1

THE SONS OF GOD

by
Obie
Book 1
Chapter 1
For the earnest expectation of the creation
waits for the manifestation of the sons of God.
Romans 8:19
It's cherry blossom time!
Rachel's mind clamored with that joyful exclamation every afternoon when she
rounded the corner into Glendale Avenue on her way home from school. Cherry
blossom time was one of her favorite parts of the day, even though the festivities
lasted only as long as it took her to walk the 48 doors from the corner of Sturt Street
and Glendale Avenue to her house.
Spring had sprung in the Great South Land, and the tiny portion of the continent
that Glendale Avenue occupied was a glorious pink and red procession of cherry
blossom trees in full bloom.
You're so beautiful I could cry, she thought as she beheld the florid splendor before
her. Why can't you be here all year long? Why do you have to go and run off in
autumn and winter? Don't you know how much I miss you?
It was a crystalline October afternoon, and the sky was an endless vault of dazzling
blue. God had banished clouds for the day. Better yet, He had set Canterbury's
thermostat on 25 degrees Celsius. Perfect!
Rachel drew in the warmth beaming down upon her, as if she were a solar battery in
desperate need of recharging. There wasn't enough sun in the sky as far as she was
concerned.
An impish breeze cavorted amongst the trees, prompting sprinklings of blossoms to
seek more tranquil lodgings on the footpath and the avenue's patchwork of lush green
lawns.
She imagined herself as a Celtic princess strolling majestically along a cobblestone
street of an ancient kingdom, cheered by adoring throngs of human and elven subjects,
and the cherry blossoms were winged fairies that would alight on her arms and
shoulders and sing her praises in a mysterious language older than the dawn of
creation, a language that gave her goose bumps and set her person aglow with tiny
glittering stars that appeared all around her.
One fairy, an ethereal maiden with sparkling golden hair, kissed her tenderly on the
cheek. "Bless you, beloved princess," she said in a voice as winsome as a babbling
brook.
Rachel smiled sweetly at the lovely fairy, who hovered in the air, thrilled to be in
the presence of royalty, "Bless you too, darling."
What did you say?
2
I said, "Bless you . . ."
Oops.
Rachel had become so entranced by her Friday afternoon reverie that she'd
forgotten she wasn't alone. Her chatterbox of a best friend, Milly, who'd been buzzing
her ears with a swarm of prattle for the past minute or so, gazed at her in puzzled
amusement. "What are you blessing me for?"
"Oh . . . um . . ." Rachel said, fumbling for a suitable lie. Telling fibs had never
been her strong suit. She'd told a few over the years, but they'd never been accepted as
the truth. Her tendency to fidget nervously and stare down at the ground like a
guilt-ridden child while she fibbed was a dead giveaway.
Thankfully Milly had religious objections to silence and wasn't about to keep her
tongue still long enough for Rachel to tell an embarrassingly transparent whopper.
"So, I haven't told you the latest goss yet. Wait till you hear it." Her pretty, blue eyes
twinkled with excitement as she paused and grinned expectantly at Rachel, waiting for
a Tell me! Tell me!
Rachel obliged her with a half-hearted "Okay, let her rip."
Milly grabbed Rachel's arm, forcing her to pull up. She scanned Glendale Avenue
warily to make sure that Rachel was the only person who could hear what she was
about to say, then tilted her head back so their eyes met, and whispered, "Guess who
lost her virginity last night."
Rachel stifled a bilious groan. This was the last secret on earth she wanted to hear.
"Who?" she asked reluctantly. If it was Milly, she didn't know what she would do,
except maybe sprint home with her hands clamped over her ears and lock herself in
her bedroom. Listening to Milly waffle on in ghastly detail about her deflowering
would be torture, unthinkable, unendurable torture.
Milly checked the coast again, then whispered, "Silvana Laredo."
"Silvana the bull dyke?" Rachel said with genuine surprise and sufficient volume to
warrant a quick look around to see whether her homophobic outburst had reached
politically correct ears.
Silvana Laredo was the chunky, hirsute daughter of a millionaire Italian
greengrocer, who went to Saint Isabella's College, the private girls' school Rachel and
Milly attended. She was loud and obnoxious and had an atonal laugh that reminded
Rachel of the groaning, screeching sound a heavy piece of furniture makes when it's
dragged across a hard-surfaced floor.
"She's not a dyke," Milly said as she pulled her head back with affected outrage.
"That's what you think," Rachel said, starting to walk on, relieved that her bosom
friend's maidenhood was still intact. "You should see her checking me out in the
changing room. She's done that I don't know how many times."
Milly chuckled and spurted after her. "Is that all? Everyone checks you out in the
changing room, Rachel. Even me."
Rachel gasped as if she'd been deprived of oxygen for a good while and punched
Milly playfully on the arm. "You little lesbo!"
"I can't help it. None of us can. All of the girls wish they looked like you. You're a
freakin' goddess, Rachel."
Rachel sighed with ennui. Not this again.
"Everyone wishes they had your legs, your bum, your boobs, and that uber covergirl
face of yours." Milly studied Rachel's crowning glory, struggling to come up with an
apt description for it. "And that . . . that . . . that bushfire of hair." She shook her head
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in disbelief, marveling at the fiery crop. "Look at it, it's freakin' awesome. Nobody has
hair like that."
"Give it a rest, will you, Milly?" Rachel groaned.
"I don't get it. You're the hottest chick in school, in the freakin' country, and you act
like it's the worst thing ever. If I was as hot as you, I'd be dating every sexy-looking
guy in town. My cherry'd be popped in seconds flat."
Rachel grimaced at the crude sexual allusion, then determined to banish it from her
mind forever. She was not about to let cherry popping time supplant cherry blossom
time when she strode into Glendale Avenue of an afternoon. Milly's teenage lust
would not sully her dreamy wanderings through her Celtic and exceedingly chaste
fairyland. No bubbles way.
She smiled to herself. Her nanna had told her that the best way to avoid soiling her
ears and mind with foul language was to substitute bubbles for whatever swear word
she was tempted to say. The added benefit of this technique was that it was hard for
her to stay angry when she said bubbles. Bubbles just wasn't a word that lent itself to
spit-flying, vulgarity hurling rage.
"Bubbles," Rachel said to herself, not meaning to say it out loud.
"It would so!" Milly insisted. "I could have any guy I wanted, as many times as I
wanted."
Short of turfing Milly head-first into one of the wheelie bins that were standing and
in some cases lying haphazardly on the nature strips after being emptied by a council
garbage truck, there was only one thing she could do to end her friend's hormonal
squawking. She took a fortifying breath, then asked, "So to whom did Silvana
surrender her virginity?"
Milly stared at Rachel, nonplussed, for a second. Then a delighted grin burst across
her face. "Tommy Rowles," she whispered excitedly.
Rachel stopped and goggled at Milly, incredulous. "That Maori beast?"
Tommy Rowles was a brown water buffalo with a dinner plate face and
almond-shaped eyes, one of the pupils of which leaned a little too close to the other.
He and the randy pack of dog turds he led, all Maoris, bar a gangly gook Rachel
dubbed the vigger, used to lie in wait for the comelier students outside Saint Isabella's
each afternoon until the police shooed them off following a rash of complaints.
One afternoon Rowles swaggered up to Rachel and in the staccato monotone that
was characteristic of Maori males said, "Hey you're pretty. "I'm having a big party at
my house this Saturday, and I want you to be my date."
She ignored the brute and walked hurriedly on, cringing at the thought of his
blubbery paws coming within cooee of her flesh.
"What's the matter, babe? Is this Maori boy too much man for you?" he shouted
behind her.
At that she stopped dead, spun toward the filthy animal, and was about to strafe him
with every racial epithet in the Unabridged Oxford Dictionary, and a few of her own
invention, when it suddenly occurred to her that she was about to commit an illegal
act, one for which some neo-Nazi types and a firebrand preacher whom the press had
dubbed the Bishop of Bigotry had recently been jailed.
As she stood there with her mouth hanging open but no words coming out, the
vigger strutted toward her, making spastic hand gestures like a gangsta rapper, his
shoulders seesawing awkwardly as if he were trying to rid himself of a mouse
scurrying around under the back of his top. "Whatcha doin' messin' wit' muh homie,
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beeeeyotch?" he said in a voice that sounded more like Jerry Lewis channeling
William Hung than it did a black street thug.
He looked ridiculous in his lime-green bandana, wraparound sunglasses, white
polyester track suit with garish purple stripes, and bright red sneakers. A color-blind
wino could've dressed better.
"Ain't nobody messes wit' muh . . ." he said, but before he could complete the
sentence he tripped on an uneven edge in the footpath and fell flat on his face.
The world seemed to pause for an instant as parents and students alike wordlessly
debated how to react to the fortunate mishap. Rachel ended the debate with a burst of
laughter that spread like melted butter among them.
That night at the family dinner table she recounted the incident to her mother and
father but kept cracking up when she got to the part about the stumblebum vigger. She
laughed so hard she almost choked on a mouthful of lasagna and got a stomach cramp.
"Rachel, that's racist!" Milly said in feigned shock but with a smile of complete
agreement, albeit a guilty one. Her delicately sculpted face was framed by cascades of
fine blonde hair that curled upward into springy waves at her shoulders. Rachel
thought of her as an exquisite porcelain doll whose longing to be like the people who
passed by the display window of the old doll shop where shed sat lonely and unloved
for years had transformed her magically into flesh and blood.
"Yeah. So? What of it?" Rachel said with a cocky grin as they stopped at the
driveway to her house, which was a double-story Edwardian with a black marble bird
bath and rows of flowering lavender plants bordered by small box hedges in the front
garden.
"Well, you . . . you . . ." Milly rummaged through her brain for a really good reason
that Rachel shouldn't be a racist but could only find the usual one: "You'll get yourself
arrested."
"Would you come and visit me in jail if I were?"
"Of course I would!" Milly averred, offended that Rachel would even have to ask.
A shocked look seized Rachel's face as her gaze shifted to the top of Milly's head.
"What's the matter?" Milly asked worriedly.
Rachel made no reply and just kept staring at Milly's crown.
"What is it?!" Milly demanded to know, afraid that some humongous creepy crawly
was perched there.
In a low, cautious voice Rachel said, "There's . . . something . . . on . . . your . . .
head."
"What?!" Milly shrieked in a whisper.
"Hair," Rachel said, then gave Milly an affectionate peck on the head.
Milly hissed in a big breath that came back out as a flabbergasted "Youuuuuuu!"
Rachel grinned, fooled ya, then waltzed up the driveway. "See you Monday."
"Hey, what was that kiss for?" Milly enquired as she watched after her.
"That was for just being you."
Milly walked off shaking her head, not so much in befuddlement but at how
wonderful the warm glow of friendship felt. It made her feel as snug as a bug in a rug.
Rachel chuckled at how adorable Milly had looked when she played her little joke
on her. She and Milly had met on their first day of high school. She'd been standing on
her own in the school courtyard during lunch, nibbling on a salad sandwich, doing her
best to ignore the envious and downright hateful glances she was copping from some
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of the older girls. Even as a willowy 12-year-old who hadn't quite filled out in all the
right places yet, she was dizzyingly beautiful.
She remembered a trio of attractive Year 10 students, eyes glaring, sizing her up as
they marched past her. One of them broke ranks, turned to the others, and whispered,
"Hasn't she got gorgeous hair?"
"Shut up!" the others snapped in unison. They comprised the upper echelon of the
school's social chain of command. They gave the orders, they got the respect, and they
weren't about to surrender their coveted positions to a buck private who, though she
could eventually out-fight, out-maneuver, and out-command the lot of them with
breathtaking ease, was a devout pacifist who wanted no part in the war, on or off the
battlefield.
Rachel was on the verge of fleeing to the school library to seek the solace of a book
when Milly, finishing the last bite of a Cherry Ripe, sidled up to her. "Is this your first
day here too?" Milly asked with a slight tremble in her voice, her teeth speckled in
chocolate.
"Yes," Rachel said, relieved she may have found a kindred spirit, if kindred only
through circumstance. "What about you?"
Milly nodded forlornly, then surveyed the giggling, gossiping cliques that dotted the
courtyard. "It makes you feel sorta left out, doesn't it?"
"Yes," Rachel said again, mentally kicking herself for not saying something more
substantial. She cleared her throat and shoved a smile on her face. "So, um, I'm
Rachel, who are you?" It wasn't exactly the most enthralling thing to say to keep the
conversational ball rolling but it was better than nothing.
Milly's face lit up like a short-circuiting neon sign. Her fear that Rachel was too
lovely to want anything to do with her, or that she wasn't interesting or pretty enough
to talk to for more than a minute, had been annihilated by Rachel's simple question
and the smile that came with it. "My name is Millicent Annaliese Jaeger," she proudly
announced, straightening up as though standing to attention. "But everybody calls me
Milly. Except my mum when I've done something I shouldn't have. Then it's
Mill-i-cennnnnnnnnt!"
Rachel smiled again, but this time the smile needed no prompting.
Milly was impossible not to like. With her birthday party eyes and gleaming,
dimpled grin she was as cute as a Labrador puppy wagging its tail, eager to receive
affection and eager to give it.
"Do you have a middle name?" Milly asked.
"Eleanor," Rachel said. "My full name is Rachel Eleanor O'Brien." She was
surprised she'd divulged that personal information so readily. Getting her to reveal
anything at all about herself, even something as innocuous as her middle name, was
typically a chore.
"Eleanor, that's a pretty name."
"Thanks. It comes from the ancient Greek word for 'sun light.' What does Annaliese
mean?"
"I wouldn't have a clue," Milly said, embarrassed she didn't know the meaning of
something as much a part of whom she was as her middle name. Now that she thought
about it, she didn't even know what her first name meant. "I know it's German,
though," she added hastily. "Probably for 'annoying spaz.'"
Rachel laughed out loud, then quickly covered her mouth, not wanting to attract the
senior students' attention.
6
Milly struggled in vain to hold back a fit of the giggles; the humor in her
self-deprecating quip hadn't escaped her either. She'd given them a much-needed
release from the relentless jangle of first-day nerves and they'd grabbed it, as if it were
a duffel bag stuffed with hundred-dollar notes.
Hunched over with laughter, they turned away from the preoccupied snobs in the
courtyard and feasted on the merry fruit of Milly's quip until their cheeks became
spillways of brine. Their need to protect themselves from the hostile new environment
of secondary college had led them to form a clique of their own, and they weren't
about to share any of its membership benefits, uncontrollable laughter for one, with
the stuck-up bitches of Saint Isabella's.
From that point on, Rachel Eleanor O'Brien and Millicent Annaliese Jaeger were
inseparable; they went everywhere together, did everything together. This was despite
the fact that they were as different from each other as a snow-covered mountain was
from a blazing desert. Rachel likened the two of them to Anne Shirley and Marilla
Cuthbert. Milly was the outgoing, loquacious Anne, and Rachel was the gruff but
tenderhearted Marilla.
Milly, just like the carrot-topped heroine, shadowed Rachel about the place, talking
her ears off about anything and everything, the more trivial the better. Rachel would
listen attentively for a while, then wander off into her imagination when the stream of
verbiage got too much for her. But she never let her mind stray too far from Milly's
sweet-natured chatter. To her, Milly's chatter was like the restful susurration of waves
tumbling onto a shore, a beautiful noise, even when it was just background noise.
Once in a while Milly would pause, look at her apologetically, and say, "I talk too
much, don't I?" To which Rachel would reply, "Nup. You don't talk nearly enough."
And she meant it.
Rachel's mother was peeling a pumpkin when Rachel entered the kitchen. She was
a 42-year-old strawberry blonde who, even in the T-shirt and tracky dacks she was
wearing, looked as lovely as a William Bouguereau painting.
Two decades ago a near-fatal car accident left her with multiple leg fractures,
cutting short an internationally lauded career as a ballet dancer. Unwilling to let a few
titanium rods come between her and her lifelong passion, she parlayed her
considerable experience as a ballet dancer into a considerable career as a ballet
teacher.
"Hi," Rachel said blandly.
"Hi," her mother said with the same degree of enthusiasm, barely glancing at her.
Rachel wanted nothing better than to go straight up to her room and lose herself in
one of the books her nanna had sent her, but she felt obligated to at least try to make
conversation with her mother. "Pumpkin soup for dinner?" she asked, wincing at her
dreary choice of topic.
"Pumpkin soup," her mother confirmed.
This is heading nowhere, Rachel thought. Her conscience, however, insisted she
give it one more try. "Would you like me to lend a hand, mum? I can"
"No. That'll be fine, Rachel," her mother interrupted, not bothering to look up from
the hefty vegetable she was denuding.
Rachel stood there roiling with frustration and disappointment for a moment, then
abandoned the kitchen for her room, failing to see the longing look her mother gave
her when she left.
7
Is there anything sexier than bookshelves crammed with books? Rachel thought.
She was standing inside the door of her upstairs bedroom, scanning her growing
collection of books with immense pride, a ritual she performed every day when she
got home from school. She was well aware that using a word like sexier in the context
of book-lined shelves made her an incurable dag, who derived more pleasure from
things than people, but she didn't give a bubble. With the notable exceptions of her
nanna and Milly, books were her companions of choice. Books were paper wormholes
through which she could visit an endless, enticing assortment of alternate worlds,
magic kingdoms, and exotic faraway lands, and even boring, everyday places, which
through deftly arranged adjectives, adverbs, and metaphors became mysterious,
intriguing and, at times, positively wondrous places. Books were gymnasiums for her
mind and imagination. They enabled her to expand and strengthen her knowledge of
the world around her, to pump up her neurological muscles so that she could
understand weightier, more profound concepts, theories, and truths, and to acquire the
intellectual might to be able to shield herself from all of the lies, deceit and, as her
nanna put it, academic treachery waiting to pounce on and devour her the instant she
stepped outside the sheltering walls of her home. But most importantly books,
certainly the books her nanna sent her, were enthralling, articulate tour guides who,
with humor, erudition, and boundless patience, walked her through her past, present,
and future, explaining who she was, where she had come from, and where she was
headed.
Her nanna once told her that if she searched the right kinds of books long and
diligently enough, she could trace the storied history of her DNA, her ancestry, back
hundreds of years, back as far as she had a mind and a resolve to go. That excited her
more than a tray of freshly made lamingtons.
Three big pine bookcases, each higher than her six-foot and a bit, dominated the
landscape of her bedroom. All three were heavily populated with books, bar the one
nearest her bed, whose bottom shelf still had room for perhaps the remaining few
works she hadn't yet read in the latest box of books and the books in the next box,
which was due in two weeks, on the knocker. Once that premium space had been
filled she'd have to start stacking books on top of the other books horizontally. There
wasn't a lot of space available for horizontal stacking, only about two inches per shelf,
and on some shelves that were taken up by taller than average books virtually no space
at all. What little space there was would be good for possibly five more boxes of
books, provided the books weren't weighty tomes, and they could well be, for they
seemed to be getting steadily thicker. Then she'd have to start stacking books on top of
the bookcases. When all of that inner-city real estate had been built on she'd have to
billet them in, or rather on, the outer-suburban areas of her desktop, dresser, and
bedside table until she could find them permanent accommodations. The trouble was
she was all out of space in her room, unless she was to start piling books on the floor,
though her mother might object to having to negotiate an obstacle course of towering
book stacks when she vacuumed the carpet.
For Rachel, having to spend so many hours away from her bookswell, only six
but they really dragged like a zombie's gammy feetwas excruciating. She was
happiest when she was home, in her room, reading a book. Her mother called her a
homebody, which was slightly better than a stay-at-home and definitely better than a
nerd, dork, geek, tard, spaz, loser, or dag.
Dag was the Aussie equivalent of nerd. Her nanna told her that after Happy Days
debuted on Australian TV in 1975, nerd, an oft-used pejorative in the show, became
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so popular it eventually pushed dag out of the Australian lexicon altogether. Her
nanna, however, was endeavoring to resurrect the word by using it in print and speech
whenever she had the chance; cobber, a long-deceased Aussie term for friend or mate,
was another word she was trying to raise from the dead. She said that Americans,
white Americans, were God's people, but the culture-eroding rubbish pumped out by
their media was anything but godly and in reality came by way of Tel Aviv.
Rachel had a sneaking suspicion Jews weren't high on her nanna's Christmas card
list, which probably came as good news to Jews, as they didn't celebrate that Christian
festival.
She set her backpack down on the floor, by her prized mahogany coat stand. She'd
bought the antique with some money she'd made from her weekend job as a checkout
chick at Safeway. Then she went to her desk, pine desk, which she planned to replace
with an oak rolltop as soon as she had the money to make the switch. The cardboard
box her nanna had squeezed full of books, 36 in all, but which now had only three in
it, was waiting for her next to her computer. She'd placed two of the books she hadn't
read to the far left and the other book, the one that had caused all the turmoil between
her and her mother (and her mother and nanna) to the far right. The symbolism of that
arrangement wasn't lost on her. She pondered the troublemaking tome with an
uncomfortable mix of fascination and guilt, as if she were gazing upon a valuable
piece of jewelry she'd shoplifted, captivated by its beauty, yet deeply regretful she'd
stolen it.
Rachel received her first book package from her nanna when she turned seven and
then a new package every three months after that without fail. For the first few years
most of the books were classic children's stories such as Grimm's Fairy Tales, The
Famous Five series of books, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. She would
have to read all of them before the next box arrived. Each box came with a
handwritten note from her nanna, usually several pages long, filled with fascinating
information about the books. She learned, for example, that Grimm's Fairy Tales were
traditional stories about the importance of racial purity that the Brothers Grimm hadn't
written, merely compiled and published, and that the lion in The Lion, the Witch and
the Wardrobe symbolized the Lion of Judah, one of Christ's titles in the Bible.
At the end of every note was a series of book-related questions she'd have to
answer, and there was no way she could answer them satisfactorily unless she'd read
each book all the way through and comprehended it fully. This would have been a
tough assignment for a 17-year-old, much less a 7-year-old, but not for Rachel. She'd
whipped through all the books well before her nanna posted the next package, and
answered all the questions tooin her own handwriting.
Her nanna said that the personal computer had made penmanship a lost art. When
her nanna looked at a letter somebody had written, she wanted to see the unmistakable
strokes and flourishes of that person's handwriting, not the production line uniformity
of Times Roman or Courier New. Microsoft Word had its placeher nanna wasn't a
total Ludditebut it was no substitute for the perspicacity and steadiness of hand
required to write an intelligent, properly spelled, and neatly presented letter. That's
why she insisted Rachel write all her letters by hand. Emails were to be used only in
the case of an emergency.
As Rachel entered her teens, non-fiction books began to predominate each package.
Her nanna wisely believed that she had reached an age when truth rather than fiction
needed to be the main focus of her literary journeys. This didn't bother Rachel at all,
because, as much as she loved reading classic novels, works that had the imprimatur
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of fact stamped on their pages held more allure for her. Non-fiction dealt with the
actual, which was often more exciting, mysterious, and bizarre than anything created
by brilliant novelists like Poe or Tolkien.
Among her favorite works of non-fiction were A Fortunate Life, the poignant
Aussie classic about a digger's triumphs and tragedies before and after both world
wars, The Irish Race in the Past and the Present, a history of her ancestors that began
in Spain and Northern Italy and ended with their mass emigration to North America,
Australia, and other white countries in the 19th century, and The Glory of the Stars, E.
Raymond Capt's complex study on how the constellations form a shining heavenly
mosaic that depicts and presages momentous biblical events. Her deeply religious
nanna made sure that the Almighty received all of the praise and glory in no less than
two books per package.
These sorts of literary works, especially Capt's, would have been daunting reads for
any young lady; however, they presented no problem to Rachel, who from an early age
could wend her way through classic literature's dense jungle of archaic words and
expressions like a bookish uni student. When Rachel was 13 her nanna gave her all
six volumes of Gibbon's masterful The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire to read. Unimpeded by its taxing prose, she'd finished the complete set and
answered her nanna's raft of questions about each volume within a month. As a
reward, her nanna gave her a gold Celtic cross to wear around her neck. She said it
was to remind her of her God, her people, and how very proud she was of her.
Rachel loved history books most of all. Her nanna said that the key to enjoying
history was knowing that it was often your history, that many of the people you were
reading about were your own flesh and blood, your family, however distant, and that
without them there would be no you.
Unfortunately politicians and minority groups were working like juiced up termites
to sever the connection white Australians had with their past and culture. Asian
history, that is, Chinese history, was now a mandatory subject in Australian schools.
Worse, every student had to learn a language of the People's Republic. Rachel was
studying Mandarin. She resented being forced to learn the language of an alien people
who had nothing in common with her aside from the fact that she and they lived on
the same planet. She'd made a solemn vow never to use their whirring babble outside
of a classroom, even if it meant going to jail. One of her classmates had foolishly tried
to start a conversation in Mandarin with her at a local cafe. Rachel glared at the poor
girl like an enraged tigress and told her to go forth and multiply. She used neither
bubbles nor its past participle on that occasion.
To the Anglophobic establishment, Rachel's trenchant white racism made her a
criminal more dangerous and reprehensible than any mass murderer or child molester.
Some of her racism was undoubtedly innate, but much of it had been cultivated by her
nanna, who for the past few years had sent her an increasing number of racist books,
everything from the other-dimensional horror tales of H. P. Lovecraft to the
sociopolitical observations of a certain Teutonic bloke who was more unpopular than
Satanmore unpopular than breast cancer in her mother's estimation.
Rachel arrived home from school one drizzly afternoon last month to find her
ropable mother waiting for her in her bedroom. On her desk was a box of books that
had come in the mail that day, which her mother had taken the liberty of opening. The
instant Rachel stepped into the room, her mother shot to her feet and thrust a book
into the air, as if she were Billy Graham displaying a Bible to a packed stadium of the
faithful. It was Mein Kampf, Hitler's notorious bestseller. "You see what your
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grandmother sent you?" she shrilled. "You see what she sent you after I told her not
to? This hateful crap!"
"You have no right to open my mail. Those books are mine," Rachel said, her eyes
welling with tears.
"I don't care, Rachel. They're going, all of them. You're not to read this filth
anymore. I won't have it in my house."
"They're my books!" Rachel yelled, stamping her foot like a petulant brat.
Her mother tossed Adolf's heavy read into the box and scooped the box up into her
arms. "These are going in the bin right now," she said, starting for the door.
"NO!" Rachel shouted with such ferocity that her mother jolted to a stop. "You're
not taking them!"
Her mother sucked in a simmering breath, then continued toward the door. "You
don't have a say in the matter."
"Give them back, you bitch!" Rachel screamed, wrenching the box out of her
mother's hands.
Her mother stared at her, stunned by her aggression.
A big tear tumbled down Rachel's cheek as she quivered with rage. In the space of a
few seconds her face had transmuted from alabaster to ruby, and her eyes had become
emerald infernos. "Get out of my room," she snarled. She was only two inches taller
than her mother but at that moment seemed to dwarf the woman like a tyrannosaurus
rex and was just as intimidating.
"Rachel . . ." her mother began to say in a circumspect yet reproving tone of voice.
Rachel slammed the box down on the desk. "I said get out of my room!"
Deciding that in this instance discretion would be the better part of valor, her
mother turned and began to march out of the room.
Rachel hounded her to the door. "Get out! Get out! GET OUT!" she screamed. She
crashed the door shut behind her and wedged a desk chair under the knob so it
couldn't be opened from the other side.
Chest pitching furiously, she turned from the door and relived what had just taken
place. Howls of anguish suddenly crowded her vocal chords. Too upset to remain
standing in a dignified manner, she dove onto her bed and bawled into her pillow.
She hated her mother for trying to confiscate her books and hated herself for what
she'd said and done. Her nanna would kill her when she found out, and her mother
would see to it that she did. Her nanna told her always to respect her parents, even
when they were driving her up the wall. God, her nanna said, took an extremely dim
view of children that disrespected their parents. Well, she was in for it now. Her
mother, her nanna, and the Creator of heaven and earth would be out for her blood.
She didn't have a hope.
"Why did you try and take my books?" she asked sobbingly. "Why?" She couldn't
believe how eager her mother had been to rob her of something that meant so much to
her, that meant everything to her. Without her books, her racist, intolerant,
anachronistic books, life would be too bleak and joyless for her to go to all the trouble
of living it.
She lay curled up on her bed like an overgrown fetus, heaving racked and very
audible sobs until finally she succumbed to sleep.
She awoke sometime later to the sound of timid knocking on her bedroom door.
She could hear her mother calling out to her in a voice softened with concern.
"Rachel? You haven't committed suicide, have you?" her mother asked.
11
"Noooo . . ." came Rachel's whiny reply, which trailed off into a feeble croak.
Under different circumstances she would have grinned at the absurdity of her mother's
question but was too miserable to do anything except beg God to take her life quietly
and painlessly when she returned to sleep. A supplication that Yahweh, as her nanna
liked to call Him, chose to ignore.
An acute ache in her conscience got Rachel out of bed at dawn the following
morning and made her compose a letter of apology to her mother. After trying several
different wordings, she went with Sorry mum, Love Rachel. It wouldn't win her the
Booker Prize, but it was to the point. She placed the letter in an envelope addressed to
MUM, then stuck the envelope to the kitchen fridge with a heart-shaped magnet.
She arrived at a park bench across the road from Saint Isabella's at 6:23am and sat
there in the bracing spring chill until the school gates swung open at 7:45am. She
could face her mother after her mother had read the letter but not before.
Having finished admiring her literary treasure trove, Rachel began another
after-school ritual. She stripped down to her undies, stood in front of her antique
cheval mirror, and examined her reflection. She was on the lookout for a fatty bulge, a
premature wrinkle or gray hair, a rotting tooth, a pimple, an ingrown toenail, tinea,
dandruff, eczema, anything that would prove she was as physically imperfect as
everybody else. Sadly her search came up empty.
Bubbles.
She was sheathed in a creamy mantle that was almost luminescent and so close to
flawless it was impossible to tell the difference. Her taut, statuesque frame formed an
athletic V-shape that started at her broad shoulders and tapered down to her hips and
feet. According to her mother, she had racehorse legs, which was supposed to mean
they were long and shapely, though she reckoned a racehorse's legs looked like bony
stilts riddled with rheumatoid arthritis. Her breasts weren't so big that they bounced
like rubber cantaloupes when she went jogging, but they were big enough for
lecherous eyes to linger on them if she was wearing a tight-fitting top. When she
smiled, vague lines swept upward from the corners of her mouth to her cheekbones,
which couldn't have been rounder and more perfectly sculpted if they'd been chiseled
out of marble by Michelangelo, and her full lips were an invitation to a feverish kiss.
Her eyes were an effulgent green. Once you were caught in their gravitational pull it
took some effort to free yourself, not that you really wanted to. And then there was her
hair. If there was anything that made her stand out in a crowd, an AFL Grand
Final-sized one, it was her hair. She had lustrous burnt orange locks whose richness of
hue and brightness of sheen set her crowning glory apart from every other head of red
hair on the planet. It was as if hers were the unadulterated original, and all the rest
were just pale imitations.
When she was a little girl she asked her nanna why she had such a blaze of oddly
colored hair. Her nanna explained that God had made her hair that color so angels
could toast marshmallows in it when she slept. The explanation was meant to delight
Rachel but it didn't. In fact it terrified her. She was worried sick she'd wake in the
middle of the night to find a fearsome group of heavenly messengers standing over
her, toasting marshmallows in her literally burning hair. She even talked her mother
into letting her sleep with a saucepan full of water on her bedside table so, in the event
of a marshmallow-toasting visitation, she could douse the flames.
One morning she popped awake, sat straight up in bed as though in a trance, and
poured the contents of the saucepan over her head. Her squeals of misery brought her
12
mother racing into the room. When her mother saw the sopping streaks of hair
plastered to her face, which made her look like a redheaded Cousin Itt, and the empty
saucepan, she roared with laughter. Whimpering pitifully, Rachel parted the dripping
curtains and peered out at her mother, aghast at the woman's flippant reaction to her
dreadful misfortune. Her mother sat on the bed and put a consoling arm around her.
"You silly sausage, you tipped water all over yourself," she said. Rachel's whimpers
relented to coy giggles and then full-blown laughter. "Did the angels get their fill of
marshmallows?" her mum chortled before planting a kiss on her sodden crown.
That was the last time Rachel kept a saucepan of water by her bed. From that point
on she stopped worrying about angels toasting marshmallows in her hair. They could
fry fish and chips in it for all she cared.
The fond memory of her and her mother deposited a melancholy smile on Rachel's
face. She remembered how close the two of them had been when she was younger.
She used to idolize her mother. What happened?
Adolescence and with it an obstinate mind of her own happened, that's what.
Her parents' moribund marriage hadn't helped her relationship with her mother
either. Her mother was seldom happy and, more often than not, just plain irritable.
The gnawing dissatisfaction her mother felt with life in general and love in particular
had a trickle-down effect on how she treated Rachel. She never abused her verbally or
physically but would criticize her over some of the most trivial things. Even before
they'd had their spat about her verboten books, Rachel made it a point to speak with
her mother only when it was absolutely necessary and to keep out of the narky
woman's way as much as possible.
Rachel suspected her father was having an affair, a suspicion doubtless shared by
her mother, who now slept in a separate room that was situated at the opposite end of
the house to his and on a different floor. The only thing that could have signified how
much they'd grown apart any more than that was a divorce, which Rachel knew had to
be imminent.
The unseemly failure of her parents' union had brought her to the realization that
marriage outside of the fairy tale one she'd envisioned for herself was too risky an
undertaking for her to attempt. Living in a confined space with a bloke for the rest of
her life, having to put up with his exasperating character flaws, and vice versa, would
be a bottle of nitro just waiting to be dropped. Besides, she was too strong-willed and
set in her ways, too much of a loner, to make any man a good wife.
She swept some wisps of hair out of her face as she gazed at her reflection. Her
long, wavy strands began as disorderly tangles that grew thicker and more unruly as
they spilled past her shoulders, ending up in an all-out brawl of curls and twirls above
the small of her back.
She hated the attention her pulchritude brought her, and it brought her a lot. If only
she were quietly beautiful like Milly, or even loudly ugly like Silvana Laredo (well,
maybe not that ugly). Anything would be better-suited to leading the quiet, bookish
life she craved than being stark blaring gorgeous.
She'd already established to her great dismay that she was still the fairest in the land
but continued to scour her reflection. This time she wasn't searching for physical
imperfections but rather something nameless and invisible that was smaller than the
smallest subatomic particle and more intangible than her soul. Every now and then she
could sense its faint prodding of her consciousness, notifying her of its presence in
some hidden and perhaps unknowable place inside her. Its sole purpose, as far as she
13
could tell, was to make her feel even more uncomfortable in her skin than she already
did by reminding her she was different, strangely, profoundly, maddeningly different.
She had first sensed its presence when she was seven. She was sitting on the rope
swing beneath the weeping willow in her nanna's backyard, staring into a shimmering
summer afternoon, when the word different popped out of her mouth without any
prompting or thought from herself. The loss of her front baby teeth had forced her to
dispense with the first e, so what she had really said was diffrent. In any case, from
that moment on she knew she was different and always would be. One absently
spoken word was all it had taken to convince her.
As usual her reflection failed to reveal the nettling mystery, though she knew her
search would be fruitless when she'd begun it; how could she find something she
couldn't see? But then maybe there was no mystery to reveal. Maybe the presence she
felt was nothing more than her own weirdness asserting itself from time to time. She
was pretty weird, after all.
She went to her window and looked out on Glendale Avenue. A translucent white
curtain shielded her from the window pane, and her bedroom light was off, so she was
in no danger of being ogled by any male passersby. The wind had whipped up a
swirling confection of dust, leaves, and cherry blossoms that scooted across the front
lawn of her house before an obstreperous gust blasted it back into the air.
As Rachel watched the blustery show, a cack-colored Muslim woman wearing a
hijab scurried past, propelling a pusher with a toddler in it. The Muslim woman was in
a big hurry to get out of the inclement weather, and it was in a big hurry to help her. A
sudden, racist gust of wind effectively doubled her leg speed, sending her and
Muhammad Jr. careering along the footpath and out of sight.
Thank you, Mr. Wind, Rachel thought.
That was the second Muslim she'd seen fouling the leafy streets of Canterbury in as
many weeks, but she knew it wouldn't be the last. Working-class suburbs like
Dandenong, Box Hill, and St. Albans, where housing prices were much cheaper, had
yielded to the non-white hordes a generation ago. But now middle-class suburbs were
being overrun by them, and even the more affluent suburbs like Canterbury were
under threat. The invaders had started their own businesses, which were thriving
because of ethnic loyalty and because there were precious few Aussie-run businesses
for her people to patronize. Moreover they'd gained key positions in many of the
country's largest corporations and now ran most of the recruitment agencies. This
made it harder for whites to find work, because the invaders preferred to hire people
of their own race. The genocidal pursuit of racial diversity had been mandated for
whites alone. Non-whites were free to be as racially exclusive as they liked.
An undeclared racial war had been launched against whites and to the impending
victors were going the spoils, namely a higher rate of employment, better houses in
better suburbs, greater economic and political clout, and the eradication of white
Australian society, its history and language, all of which would be replaced by
whatever society, history, and language the victors had in mind. The only thing to be
decided was who the victors would be. Would they be Chinese, Indonesians, Arabs, or
subcontinent Indians? Maybe they'd be a toxic soup of all four. The multiculturalists
could only dream.
Rachel knew that these weren't the kinds of things a young woman was supposed to
spend her time thinking about. She was supposed to think about dating, doing her hair
and nails, and which pop star was hot and which pop star was not, but the socially
radioactive books she loved to read made not thinking about them impossible. She
14
was like that itinerant muscle-bound guy in They Live. She had put on the special
glasses and seen the world and the people in it as they really were, and now that she
had, now that her eyes had been opened, there was no way she could unsee them.
A cherry blossom tree on the nature strip outside her house thrashed about in the
wind. A powerful gust made it stoop in her direction as if it were bowing down to her.
She curtsied appreciatively.
She was about to take a nap, another after-school ritual of hers, but first had to open
the window to let some fresh air in. The trick was to open it without flaunting her
swimsuit-model body to any male passersby who might be out for a quick perv. She
stood to the right of the window and, with only her bare forearm visible to the outside
world, hoisted it open about four inches. The curtain rolled and spun like a
hyperactive ghost in the windy torrent that gushed into the room.
She lay down on her bed. She'd set her internal alarm to wake her in half an
hourit was as reliable as that of any clock. The 30-minute nap would put a safe
distance between her mind and the diabolical agitprop that had attempted to abduct it
during school. That way she'd be in a more lucid and receptive state when she was
courted, cerebrally speaking, by The Story of the Goths, the latest in a long line of
well-educated but rather musty racialist suitors, which was waiting patiently for her on
her bedside table.
A cherry blossom blown into the room by the fractious wind wafted onto her
tummy. No. It wasn't a cherry blossom. It was the lovely golden-haired fairy, who
sought respite from the wild weather with her beloved princess and future queen.
Rachel sighed blissfully from the wind's tingling caresses. "Different," she muttered
as she drifted across the seamless threshold, into slumber.
Different.
She was different, all right. But at this point in her young life she had no idea just
how different.
Chapter 2
Woe to them that devise iniquity, and work evil
upon their beds! when the morning is light, they
practise it, because it is in the power of their hand.
Micah 2:1
Rosella's don't fly like that, he thought. They can't fly like that. That's not possible.
Nathan watched gobsmacked as the tiny, feathered flash of blue and crimson
performed its loony acrobatics routine in front of a massive ghost gum.
Somewhere behind the big albino the sun was descending into the horizon, and it
was descending in style, splashing the sky in brilliant orange, red, and mustard hues
and deepening the somber gray shadows with successively darker brushstrokes of
dusk as Tulson's Stretch slowly bid daylight adieu.
The Rosella tumbled over and over on the same patch of air, as if it were stuck on
an invisible treadmill, then rolled sideways in a downward arc, stopped dead, flitted
across the air in a straight line for about six feet, then rolled sideways in an upward
arc until it got stuck on the invisible treadmill again, whereupon it would go tail over
beak awhile before repeating its mystifying act.
15
Poor thing must have cerebral palsy, Nathan thought with a wry smile.
There was another, more disturbing possibility: the native bird may have dined on a
tainted crop and was now having to deal with the business end of man's reckless
attempt to improve on creation.
Almost the entire population of Tulson's Stretch was in attendance at the barbeque,
which had to be held on a football oval in Ouyen, just east of Tulson's. As barbeques
went, it wasn't much of a one. The Department of Agriculture, or more precisely the
Australian taxpayers, had piled on a feast of meat and grog, but it was poor
compensation for the famine of hope that was laying waste to the community.
These had once been the hardiest of people. Most were farmers who for years had
endured the rigors of drawing crops from the soil and bore the physical scars in the
form of skin cancers, broken-down body parts and, in some cases, missing body parts
to prove it. But now they seemed to shamble about like bloodless peons beaten into
subjection by a cruel tyrant. Although they had shown some sign of their old fire
earlier, it had been evanescent. Now all but a few of them were back to their usual
demoralized selves, resigned to the knowledge that doomsday was coming for them
and wasn't sparing the gas.
A deluge of imported foreign produce and the ever-decreasing pittance they
received for their crops from the supermarket chains had staggered their once mighty
spirit, but it was agricultural Armageddon in the guise of a genetically modified strain
of tomato that had delivered the knockout blow.
The first recorded instance of the Standing Death took place in Guyana. Raphael
Sosa, 52, was a farmer who grew lychees on a 13-acre plot of land on the edge of the
Amazon rainforest. One afternoon, he plopped his jiggling bulk on a packing crate in
front of his lopsided hovel. It had been a level-sided hovel, but a monsoonal
downpour the previous year had loosened the soil around the house stumps, causing
the left side of the dwelling to sink five inches. The day had been excruciatingly
muggy, and Raphael, a fountain of sweat, had taken time out from his labors to
rehydrate himself with a cool glass of lemonade and a mammoth orange he'd plucked
from a neighbor's orange tree that overhung his property. He was only two bites into
the juice-squirting monster when a cramp locked up his left calf muscle, turning it into
what felt like a searing lump of petrified wood. So he did what he always did when he
got a leg cramp: he stood up to walk it off. Walking loosened the muscle and
dissipated the cramp, even though the first few steps were sometimes more painful
than they were worth. On this occasion, however, aggravating the pain wasn't an issue,
for he didn't get to take a single step. As soon as he'd wriggled to his feet, a bomb,
metaphorical but just as devastating, exploded in his chest, sending him into cardiac
arrest. Suds of spittle flew out of his mouth, and his eyes spun toward the sky, as he
shook like a 350-pound belly dancer. Then he headbutted the Amazonian soil, dead.
Because Raphael had been lugging around twice as many kilos as the average man
of his age and height, his death wasn't seen as anything out of the ordinary at first, so a
day later, when another farmer in the area suffered a fatal heart attack after eating a
tomato and cheese sandwich, nobody saw any reason to connect the two incidents. But
come the end of the following week, with the death toll having risen to 26, including
eight women and five children, all of whom lived within a 30-mile radius of each
other, it was obvious that the sudden rash of fatal heart attacks had forsaken
coincidence.
When reports of the strange spate of deaths began to be picked up by major news
sources around the world, the Guyanian authorities rallied to get to the bottom of what
16
was causing the villagers in such a finite area to drop like concrete bowling balls, but
mostly they rallied to save face. Three weeks later, with the death toll nudging 200,
and the Guyanians no closer to finding an explanation for the epidemic of fatal heart
attacks, WHO agents, escorted by heavily armed UN troops, quarantined the area,
which now encompassed a 50-mile radius. Autopsies performed on the corpses, which
had been placed in a hastily erected morgue surrounded by a razor wire fence and
patrolled by soldiers clutching AK-47s, failed to reveal anything in addition to what
had already been determined, namely that all the victims had died of a coronary
occlusion.
One thing WHO's crack squad of microbiologists and forensic pathologists were
able to ascertain was where the disease had originated. It was a tomato farm right
smack in the middle of the 50-mile radius. The farm was host to a test crop of a new
genetically modified tomato, christened BV10986F by the biogeneticists who'd
re-engineered the vegetable in the high-tech laboratory of Zidencorp, a multinational
chemical corporation. The strain was an improved version of an old strain that had
been withdrawn from the market a decade earlier owing to "certain nutritional
inconsistencies", which was how "a carcinogenic toxin present in the tomato" read
after it had been given a verbal makeover by Zidencorp's public affairs department.
The toxin was a by-product of the tomato's ability to coat its skin in pesticide. The
pesticide killed tomato-loving bugs with the greatest of ease, but it also killed a
handful of people who'd acquired a taste for that variety of tomato. While the number
of deaths wasn't statistically significant enough for anyone to point an accusatory
finger at the tomato, Zidencorp knew it was holding a ticking time bomb that could
nuke the multinational's plans to monopolize the agricultural market and wipe it off
the map financially if a class action lawsuit were filed against it. The carcinogen was
too potent for it not to cause a spike in the number of lives lost to cancer, and sooner
or later somebody in the medical industry or news media was bound to link the spike
to the consumption of the ubiquitous tomato.
But that was then.
After nine years of intensive experimentation, Zidencorp's scientists had at last
remade the death-dealing tomato into what they were sure was a benign tomato. This
one contained twice as much vitamin C as a non-GMO tomato and no carcinogens or
anything else that might besmirch the multinational's public image and obliterate its
share price. The new tomato didn't even produce its own pesticide. None of the
pesticides Zidencorp's range of GMO crops had deployed proved to have long-term
effectiveness, anyway. The ability of insects to adapt to even the most powerful
pesticides was miraculous; God had promised there would be plenty of bugs and He
was keeping His promise. But although Zidencorp had done everything scientifically
possible to ensure that BV10986F would hurt no one and nothing, it still wasn't
enough, for lurking somewhere in the tomato's complex biochemical structure was an
infinitesimal serial killer whose propensity for murder was seemingly limitless.
Prior to Raphael Sosa's historic death, a flock of macaws had taken a fancy to the
test crop. Not long after they'd feasted on the tomatoes, the birds began to exhibit
unusually aggressive behavior. Villagers reported that the macaws would dive bomb
them and slam into trees and buildings. The birds that managed to survive would flop
wildly on the ground, pecking at the feet of anyone who approached them, until they
expired, or fly erratically about jettisoning goodly amounts of feces on heads,
rooftops, and sundry crops. WHO's investigative team surmised that the feces
contained the deadly bacterium, which was absorbed by whatever fruit or vegetable it
17
came into contact with, and was then passed onto those unfortunate souls who ate that
fruit or vegetable. But it was only a theory. Until they knew for sure what the
bacterium was, if indeed it was a bacterium, how it was spread was purely a matter of
conjecture. They weren't even sure whether the new strain was entirely to blame or
whether the macaws were partly responsible. A popular but unproven theory was that
the macaws' biochemistry had reacted adversely to the chemical composition of the
tomatoes and that this reaction had somehow spawned the putative bacterium.
The WHO junta managed to confine the outbreak to the 50-mile radius for a month,
but then reports of people dying of the sickness far outside the quarantined area began
to emerge and multiply. Realizing there was no point trying to plug holes in a dam
that had already burst, and with reporters baying for full disclosure, WHO called a
press conference to announce the arrival of a new plague on the earth, potentially the
deadliest. The medical term for it was SAOS (Sudden Arterial Occlusion Syndrome),
but it came to be known more popularly as the Standing Death. Guyanian villagers
came up with the name because, bizarrely, everyone who died of SAOS died in a
standing position. Nobody had the foggiest why this was so. WHO's scientists
speculated that the sudden gravitational shift in the victims' bodies caused a minute
biochemical change that precipitated a fatal occlusion, though they had no proof of
this.
Once news of the SAOS outbreak had gained traction in the global media, there
was no stopping the debates about what the sickness was and who was behind it. The
Jews, the Illuminati, the Bilderbergers, extraterrestrials, intraterrestrials, neo-Nazis,
old-time Nazis, environmental activists, Satan, and scores of other likely suspects fell
into the crosshairs of the trigger-happy conspiracy theorists who were itching to blow
the perps away with their hollow-point rhetoric and armor-piercing hypotheses. But
Nathan knew who really was behind the deadly scourge. Even a 16-year-old spaz with
cerebral palsy like him had brains enough to figure that out.
It was God.
The Standing Death was His way of thumbing His nose at Zidencorp's and WHO's
finest minds and everybody else who fell prostrate before the false god of science. He
had thrown them a biological Gordian Knot and said, "Here! Solve this!" And try to
solve it they were, but the sheer complexity of the puzzle and its overwhelming
strangeness was beginning to shake their once unshakeable faith in their god. They
were clueless and so was he.
Nathan chuckled as he pictured them racing around like a pack of highly strung Jap
scientists in an old Godzilla flick, shouting hysterically and waving their hands in
their air over their inability to halt the monster's rampage. His condition made it
impossible for him to smile and next to impossible for him to laugh out loud, but
chuckling didn't pose too much of a problem, though it sounded a lot more like
agonized grunting than it did chuckling. To add to the confusion, whenever he
chuckled, saliva would bubble at the corners of his mouth, and his head would bob
like a Jack-in-the-box's, giving people the impression he was having some sort of
seizure. His mum would have to allay their concern by explaining his tricky body
language to them. He was alone for the moment, so he was free to bob and bubble all
he liked.
His mum had left him in a quiet spot behind the oval's car park to watch the sunset
while she spoke to the media and Senator Jones about what needed to be done to
prevent Tulson's demise as a farming communityas a community, period. He loved
watching sunsets; their raw beauty had a soothing effect on him, much like Amanda
18
did but without all the teen angst and feelings of utter hopelessness she aroused in
him. But as awesomely beautiful as this sunset was, the whack-job rosella had
upstaged it. Even Sergeant Carter would have been impressed by the bird's stamina.
About eleven weeks after Raphael Sosa's chubby chops smacked dirt outside his
left-leaning hovel, SAOS found its way into the United States. Whether it was
deposited there by a migratory bird or an illegal immigrant crossing the Mexican
border was anybody's guess. So far it had killed more than 300 people in Texas,
though alternative news sources were reporting that the actual number of dead was
probably 10 times higher than that, and had spread to Arizona and New Mexico.
WHO predicted that the death toll would rise exponentially if the manmade plague
swept through other states in the union, and there was no reason to believe that it
wouldn't.
The following month SAOS arrived on Australian shores, somehow managing to
bypass a gauntlet of stringent security measures instituted by the Australian Customs
Department in order to prevent such an occurrence. Ground zero for the first case of
the Standing Death Down Under was the racially kaleidoscopic and very Bohemian
Melbourne Suburb of Richmond. The Victorian government placed an immediate
embargo on the sale and transportation of all fruit and vegetables in the state of
Victoria. Similar embargoes were then introduced to New South Wales and
Queensland, following outbreaks of SAOS in those states.
For an entire winter and the greater part of the ensuing spring, fruit and vegetables
were off the menu in most Aussie households and restaurants and couldn't be bought
for love or money. Fearing the impairment to their immune systems caused by a diet
bereft of the vitamins, minerals, and enzymes found in fruit and vegetables, a few
intrepid souls continued to eat both food groups. All of them, bar a Turkish
octogenarian and his mentally enfeebled son, managed to survive that risky decision.
As green grocers all over the country were forced to shut up shop or went out of
business, the manufacturers of health food supplements were dancing for joy. Their
range of herbal, mineral, and multivitamin tablets were flying off supermarket and
health food store shelves faster than they could keep up with the demand.
Supplements had taken the place of fruit and vegetables, for those who could afford to
buy them. This excluded pensioners, the unemployed, and most people who had to get
by on less than $50k per annum. Even before SAOS embarked on its global killing
spree, health food supplements were luxury items that only the well-to-do could afford
to buy regularly.
Consumers who'd bought organic heirloom seeds prior to the outbreak also struck it
big. Packets of seeds that once cost $5 to $10 were now fetching upwards of $1000 on
eBay. A single packet of tomato seeds had sold for a record $5200 USD. If the seeds
were non-GMO and you could keep birds and bugs away from them, you stood a good
chance of growing an uncontaminated crop. But there was no guarantee you would. A
veteran biodynamic farmer did everything and a bit more to grow a SAOS-free crop of
radishes but still fell victim to the sickness, in his case, literally.
In the meantime Zidencorp had contrived a blue dye that when sprayed on a crop
would turn bright pink if the crop was contaminated. The dye worked most of the
time, but it did have a few drawbacks. It was indelible, so once it had been applied it
couldn't be washed off. This meant that all fruit and vegetables bore blue patches,
which discouraged many consumers from buying them; a shiny red apple lost all of its
aesthetic appeal when it was defaced with what looked like matte-blue spray paint.
19
Zidencorp had assured the public that the dye was tasteless and harmless, but some
consumers said it had a bitter taste, while others claimed it gave them headaches.
There was a rumor it contained nanobots that monitored the physical health of people
who ate the dyed food. In the face of an outlandish phenomenon like the Standing
Death, even the craziest theory seemed plausible. Notwithstanding, the Melbourne
Herald Sun newspaper reported that an anonymous source within Zidencorp had seen
official company documents stating there were nanobots in the dye, a claim vigorously
denied by a spokeswoman for the multinational.
Sometimes the dye didn't detect SAOS until weeks or even months after its
application. A bright pink blotch on a cabbage in a supermarket took three months to
appear. This was in stark contrast to the couple of minutes it took for shoppers and
staff to flee the supermarket after an elderly Italian woman pointed at the infected
vegetable and screamed, "The Death! The Death!"
As was now standard operating procedure, men in biohazard suits descended on the
supermarket and cast all of the produce in the fruit and vegetable department into a
high-tech dumpster, which was then whisked away to a toxic waste disposal facility
where contaminated and possibly contaminated produce were summarily cremated.
Being primarily a farming community, Tulson's Stretch was one of the country
towns hit hardest by the SAOS outbreak. Regardless of the fact that no SAOS-infected
produce had been found there and none of the population had died of the sickness, the
Department of Agriculture had classified the town as a level two risk. Level one
meant that the town was in no risk of a SAOS outbreak, level three meant that the
town had experienced or was experiencing an outbreak, and level two meant that a
SAOS outbreak was likely and that moderate quarantine precautions needed to be put
in place. These precautions included but were not limited to restricting the harvesting
and transportation of any and all crops for however long the Department of
Agriculture deemed necessary. "However long" at this stage had amounted to two
months for Tulson's Stretch, but the Department looked set to extend that for an
indefinite period because of the town's close proximity to the South Australian border.
It was feared that an outbreak in Tulson's would lead to an outbreak in South Oz. No
SAOS-sullied produce had been linked to the farming community, but a pallet load of
infected oranges had been traced to an areaa very large areathat included Tulson's
and 11 other country towns, so the Department decided to quarantine all of them.
With farmers unable to grow crops for the foreseeable future, the unemployment
rate in Tulson's Stretch had skyrocketed to a whopping 65 percent. Other farming
communities were reporting similar jobless figures. Most of Tulson's farmers were on
the dole. Although they'd been contributing to federally sanctioned charitable works
for decades through generous gifts of taxation, they didn't accept government
handouts readily. Nevertheless they had families to feed and so their pride had to be
swallowed along with the meager rations their fortnightly food credits afforded them.
Prime Minister Melanie Chong's Labor government had been dragged into the
streets and soundly drawn and quartered by the Australian media for its appalling
neglect of the agricultural sector. Not that the media, which was as far to the political
left as the Bolshevik Revolution, gave a fat rat's clacker about farmers. But what it did
care about was the incessant attempts by Chong and her cohorts to impose draconian
restrictions on its right to report the news without fear or favor. Supporting the
plighted farmers was a means by which it could get some payback and push tacitly for
the defeat of the incumbent government at the next federal election. The irony was
that the media's reportage was skewed to the left irrespective of the government's
20
efforts to legislate that bias. What it objected to was being told what and whom it
must be biased toward. It could make up its own mind about that.
So the Labor government, in response to intense pressure from the media and the
dwindling but still politically formidable white European electorate, suddenly
developed tremendous compassion for the agricultural sector. The government's secret
long-range plan was to do away with all but a few Australian farms, which would be
kept only for appearance's sake. Ninety-nine percent of fruit and vegetables would be
imported from China and elsewhere overseas. But for the time being, the government
would pander to the uncouth, redneck workers of the land, promising them everything
but giving them as little as possible until the pressure was off and it could go back to
being as indifferent to their plight as it had previously been.
Nathan cranked his head to the right to see what everyone was up to. His mum was
talking the ear off a young male reporter who was making an effort but not a big one
to appear interested in what she was saying. Jones was nearest to Nathan, though a
good 30 meters away, trying to ingratiate himself with Bill and Noreen Truffett, who
owned and ran the town's pub. The married couple had shouted abuse at him when he
was giving his speech. Even from this distance Nathan could tell by Jones' body
language that he was a con artist. The deliberate hand gestures, the smarmy, bogus
smile fixed to his face like a ventriloquist dummy's, were too rehearsed to belong to
an honest man who had the community's best interests at heart. All politicians were
con artists to a certain degree, but Jones was a class apart. What Jones had been doing
earlier made that all too obvious.
Suddenly Nathan's flesh prickled. While Bill and Noreen explained to a TV news
reporter why they'd shouted what they'd shouted, Jones looked his way. It was as if
Jones had picked up his thoughts and felt compelled to see who was thinking them.
A dreadful chill swept through Nathan as Jones' noxious gaze pumped what felt like
liquid nitrogen into his marrow. After a tumescent second, Jones focused on the
Truffetts again, and Nathan huffed with relief.
Nathan's Uncle Reg said that Jones was a crazy bitser, a self-conflicted racial spill
of abo, Polak, and Jew (the abo component probably accounted for Jones' ball of
frizzy hair).
Jones was orphaned when he was four years old after his parents were killed in a
light plane crash and was fostered into a family who ran a cattle farm in
Warrnambool. Having to grow up on a farm was one of the worst things that could
have happened to Jones, as the Jew part of him hated rural life. Farming and manual
labor as a whole were anathemas to the Juden, who felt at home only in a big city,
where they could work as lawyers, doctors, investment bankers, and in other more
lucrative, less physically demanding jobs. Anywhere else would drive them mad,
though most Jews were mad to begin with, or so Uncle Reg said.
Legend had it that when Jones was in his late teens he'd go roo shooting with his
mates. Jones would rarely participate in the shoot itself, preferring to cavort about in
the nuddy, howling at the moon and humping the odd dead kangaroo. His mates were
usually too drunk to do anything except laugh at his depraved antics. One night a new
member of their crew threatened to kick the crap out of him if he didn't stop acting
like a nut. Jones responded by calmly picking up a rifle and firing three bullets into
the young man's chest. His mates were so shocked by the casually wrought atrocity
that for a long while they just stared in silence at the steam rising up into the cold
night air from the bloody chest of their dead friend. When they finally came to their
alcohol-impaired senses, they wrapped his corpse in a tarp and dumped it in a river.
21
They told the police that their friend went skinny dipping on a bet and never surfaced
after he'd dove in. A team of police divers scoured the river for a week but failed to
recover the body.
Charges were never laid against Jones or any of the other boys, because the police
could find no evidence of foul play. The homicide detectives who worked on the case
suspected that Jones was involved in the young man's disappearance, but without a
body they couldn't turn their suspicions into a conviction.
Why Jones' mates didn't dob him in for his crime depended upon which version of
the story you heard. In one version he bribed them with a large sum of money he stole
from a brothel. In another he slipped them a Mickey Finn that turned them into raving
yet pliable homicidal maniacs who murdered their fellow roo shooter at his behest and
then forgot all about it when the drug wore off. In still another he threatened to release
video footage of them having sex with a 10-year-old girl if they told the cops what had
really happened.
Shortly after the young man went missing, Jones moved out of home, a decision
welcomed by his foster parents, who were increasingly unnerved by his odd behavior,
and got himself a flat in Melbourne. With its cosmopolitan lifestyle and ethnically
florid population, Melbourne was paradise on Earth for Jones.
Thanks to his Torres Strait Islander heritage, he was accepted into Melbourne
University's prestigious law course and was soon dux of his classat least that's what
he told everyone. Some former classmates, when interviewed by a journalist writing a
feature article on Jones, said he was an average student at best and seemed to be more
interested in heading the university's Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Alliance, a
militant group of Marxist sexual degenerates, than he was in studying the law.
Jones insisted he wasn't a homosexual and that his involvement with the alliance
stemmed from his belief that championing the rights of sexual and racial minorities
was a vital step to a successful career as a lawyer. Rumor pegged him as a bisexual
with a fondness for underage girlsboys too if they were overly effeminateso his
dedication to upholding the rights of fags, dykes, and darkies may have been
influenced by his alleged proclivities. Luckily for Jones his Aboriginal and Jewish
ancestry discouraged people from verbalizing their doubts about his moral character at
a volume level above a whisper. You didn't call an abo an abo, and a kike a kike,
unless you were prepared for a long stay in Bluestone College. But calling somebody
an abo and a kike? They'd give you the death penalty for that, if Australia had the
death penalty.
After graduating from university with the assistance of a chink spiv who tripped
over a copy of the final term exam papers while out walking one day, Jones landed a
job as a corporate lawyer in training for an esteemed and Jewish law firm in a stately
bluestone building at the Paris end of Collins Street. His original plan was to become
a criminal lawyer, as that was regarded as the most glamorous branch of the legal
profession and would give him the celebrity he cravedthere was nothing like
helping a notorious killer beat a murder rap for boosting your street credhowever, it
had failed miserably. Corporate law was arguably the easiest branch of the law to
practice, yet Jones was unable to handle even the simplest of cases without substantial
assistance from the firm's senior lawyers. If corporate law was too difficult for him,
criminal law would be like trying to win the 100-meter sprint at the Olympics while
piggybacking a grand piano. The ability to finesse logic on the spot in the electrified
atmosphere of a courtroom during a murder trial had shot past him like the other
22
competitors in the race would have, and everyone who worked for the firm knew it,
including him.
Jones blamed the Aboriginal contribution to his DNA for the shortfall in his legal
accomplishments. Whenever he stuffed up, which was frequently, he'd lock himself in
one of the stalls in the firm's men's room and stomp repeatedly on the head of an
imaginary Torres Strait Islander cowering on the floor. "Bloody abo! You stupid
bloody abo!" he'd growl as he caved in the black bastard's skull.
If it wasn't for the fact that Jones had a major ally in the law firm, he would have
been sacked long ago. Isaac Rothstein, the head of the firm, had taken a liking to
Jones. Rothstein was an aged reptilian Jew who looked as if he'd slithered out of an
anti-Jewish political cartoon of the 1920s. A veteran mover and shaker in the
Australian Labor Party, Rothstein had an uncanny ability to back the winning
candidate in an electoral race. His knack for knowing what the voters were looking for
in a prime minister or a state premier at any given time in Australia was revered in
political circles. Rothstein knew that Jones had no business practicing law, but he also
knew that Jones was a moral abyss who wouldn't hesitate to say or do anything in
order to gain wealth and power. Jones would make the perfect politician; textbook
sociopaths like him always did.
Transforming erring Jones into a consummate politician wasn't Rothstein's ultimate
goal for the roly-poly Jew, merely a stepping stone. The ultimate goal was to make
Jones the country's first Jewish prime minister since the rabid internationalist,
Malcolm Fraser, whose Ashkenazi origins were still a well-kept secret. Jones'
inveterate stupidity, cardsharp cunning, and yawning lack of empathy for his fellow
man meant he could be easily manipulated by his handlers but was shrewd enough not
to do anything to expose them. He would play the game and play it well because he
stood to benefit handsomely from it.
Jones was pronounced a future star of the ALP before a large gathering of the
party's leading lights and then went on to win the safe Labor seat of Lalor in a
by-election after the previous incumbent, a happily married man in his early thirties
with a growing family, no known substance abuse, mental health issues, or skeletons
in his closet, hanged himself while his wife and children were out shopping one
Saturday afternoon. A federal election was due to be held next year. Prior to that there
would be a successful challenge to Melanie Chong's leadership, which would see
Jones replace the Eurasian lesbian as the incumbent PM.
Political pundits were expecting a huge public backlash to sweep Labor from power
in the coming election, but what was expected and what would actually happen were
two completely different things. Jones had been anointed by the learned elders of
Australia to run the country as its puppet leader. Therefore Labor had to win the most
senate seats regardless of how many genuine votes Labor candidates received. And
win them Labor would, for votes were just numbers, and numbers, like people, were
easily manipulated.
Nathan must have seen the rosella perform its wacky shtick a hundred times now,
and it was showing no sign of letting up. He wondered whether this could be the
world's first case of avian OCD.
"Hello there," came a patronizingly cheery voice. It belonged to the Minister for
Agriculture, Larry Jones the Jew, who was heading his way, unaccompanied. The
sneering grin on Jones' cartoonish face would have made the Singing Nun upchuck.
"How's things, young fella?" he asked, stressing fella with a blokey but mocking roll
23
of his head. Noting that Nathan had been observing the rosella, Jones clicked his
fingers, motioning for the bird to take its leave. The rosella obeyed and tumbled
backward over the big ghost gum, into the darkening twilight.
Nathan's affliction thwarted his attempts to express emotion in a way that didn't
make him look as though he were locked in mortal combat with constipation but not
this time. This time he was able to express what he felt, shock, as plainly as anyone.
"It's one of ours," Jones said with a sly wink.
Spy drones, they were every-bloody-where! Nathan would have kicked himself for
not twigging what it was if that wasn't physically impossible for him.
Larry glanced at the townsfolk to make sure none of them could hear what he was
about to say, then his eyes burrowed into Nathan's and he began to speak his mind.
"Here we go, darls."
Nathan's mum had just parked him out front of the 200 or so fold-up chairs that had
been arranged before the dais from which the Minister for Agriculture would shortly
address the good and royally pissed off people of Tulson's Stretch, who were rapidly
filling them. "Sorry, love," she said, then kissed him on the cheek and took a seat
behind him. The apology was for using him to elicit sympathy from Jones and the
public, who would see him in photos and TV news footage of the event. Sympathy for
Nathan would generate sympathy for the farming community as a whole. Her hope
was that the public would be so outraged over what was happening to Tulson's and
other farming towns, they would pressure politicians to bring Australia's agricultural
sector back from the brink, though she knew that wasn't likely. Australia and the rest
of the first world were about to plunge into a financial abyss that even conservative
economists were predicting would be deeper and darker than the Great Depression.
The average person was going to be too busy looking for work and trying to scrape
enough money together to buy food than to worry about a few country folk who were
down on their luck. Soon everybody would be down on his luck.
Nathan's mum had asked his permission to place him where she did. Naturally he'd
given it. How could he not? For all of his 15 years she had fed him, dressed him,
bathed him, wiped his bottom, got him out of bed of a morning, and put him to bed of
a night. She wasn't just his mum, she was his arms and his legs and his vocal chords.
She was one year shy of 50 and had scarcely more meat and bone on her tiny frame
than a will-o-the-wisp, yet possessed the near-superhuman stamina that God seemed
to bestow every devoted mother. Only a bout of pneumonia, which had come close to
taking her life last year, had stopped her from performing her motherly duties, and
even then it was for just three days.
His late father, who died of pancreatic cancer when he was five, used to share the
responsibility of tending to him. Nathan clung to the few memories he had of the big
jovial fellow, who stood just half an inch shorter than their house's door lintels and
would stride into his room, singing a rollicking ditty, and scoop him out of bed, as if
he weighed no more than a block of balsa wood. Why God had thought it necessary to
take such a good man so young, leaving his poor mum to slave over him solo for the
rest of her days, was something he couldn't come to terms with. Dr. Williamson, their
church pastor, had counseled her that YahwehYahweh being the Hebrew name for
Godsaw to it that tragedies always turned out to be blessings for His followers. Her
granite-like faith, which could weather the most trying of circumstances, enabled her
to accept that glib assurance, but Nathan's was more like a pile of dust: the merest
breath of doubt would scatter it to the five windsand there were only four.
24
Sometimes his mum would look him dead in the eye and ask, "Are you believing
Yahweh will bless us, Nath?" He'd reply with "I'm trying to, mum," which would
blunder out of his mouth as a Scooby Dooesque "I rying roo, rum." She'd smile
understandingly and say, "I know you are, darls. I know you are."
His mum had hung framed Bible promises in every room of their house, even the
dunny, and would often recite them to remind herself that God could be depended on.
Nathan would gaze up at them every now and then and chant them in his mind, trying
to raise the proverbial mustard seed. His mum told him it was important to speak the
verses out loud. "Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God," she'd say.
But it was hard for him to draw faith from hearing the Word when his spastic mouth
reduced the King James Version's august English to drool-festooned snorts and
groans.
Many a night he'd lie awake in bed, wondering why God would let him spend his
whole life trapped in the useless contortion he had for a body. He'd ask God questions
he was sure his saintly mother would condemn as blasphemous. Once he asked if
Christ had suffered as much on the Cross as he had in his 15 years. Christ had the
edge when it came to intensity of pain, but he had the edge when it came to duration
of pain. He'd suffered a thousand times longer than Christ had and his suffering was
ongoing. It wouldn't stop until God said, "That's enough," and finally ended his
misbegotten existence.
Tears of guilt would sting his eyes after he'd posed these questions, and his body
would tremble as if it were about to burst from a massive build-up of pressure. He'd
give anything to be able to expel the years of pent-up frustration in one thunderous
roar of rage that would speckle the floorboards with ceiling plaster, but it was as much
a prisoner of his spastic body as his mind was.
His mum would put him to bed around 8 pm every evening9 pm during daylight
savingor as soon as it was dark. He was well and truly buggered by then. Being
stuck in a body that refused to do almost everything he wanted it to was bloody hard
work; just the physical effort required to move a leg or an arm could exhaust him. The
temptation was not to do anything, to just slump unmoving in his wheelchair like the
gimpy blob he was, although that would only make the problem worse, for his
muscles would atrophy and his body would become even more uncooperative.
Every Thursday morning his mother would drive him the 140 or so kilometers to
his weekly physiotherapy session in Swan Hill. He used to hate physio nearly as much
as he hated being a spaz. His former physiotherapist, a stocky middle-aged sadist, with
a buzz cut, he'd nicknamed Sergeant Carter, had had all the sensitivity of a steam
shovel. His marionette-like limbs would ache for hours after the agonizing workouts.
When Sergeant Carter announced he was moving overseas to marry a Chinese
woman he'd courted online, Nathan let loose an ecstatic "Yay!" That was how it was
meant to sound, anyway, but his contrary vocal chords mangled it so badly that it
came out as a sorrowful "Gaaaaaah!" His mother scowled at him. She was
well-acquainted with his verbal idiosyncrasies and knew what he'd intended to say.
Moved by what he thought was an ejaculation of deep sadness, Carter crouched
before Nathan and, like John Wayne addressing a marine platoon that had suffered
heavy casualties, said, "We've been through a lot, you and me. It hasn't been easy, I
know. But you've been brave, strong, a pleasure to work with."
Nathan glanced at his mother, who was stifling laughter. Carter had no idea he was
making a complete nong of himself.
25
"You be a good boy now," Carter said as he pinched Nathan's nose and gave it a
little wriggle.
Condescending bastard had too many syllables for Nathan to attempt to say it.
With Sergeant Carter gone from his life foreverplease, GodNathan began to
look forward to his physio sessions, not because he enjoyed the exercises but because
he was desperately infatuated with the flaxen-haired angel who'd replaced Carter.
Amanda Grainger was a 23-year-old babe straight out of uni with a voice that could
lullaby a demolition derby and hands that could make a dead man's nerve endings do a
merry jig. She was beautiful, sexy, charming, funny, intelligent, and as kindhearted as
his mum, which was saying a lot. If Nathan had a dream girl, Amanda was that girl
squared.
Unlike Sergeant Carter, who would bend and twist and yank him as if he were a
disabled Stretch Armstrong, Amanda would gently ease his limbs and extremities out
of their loitering positions while monitoring his face for the first hint of pain. She
could always tell when he was experiencing gain pain or serious pain, because the
latter would make his head shiver, as though somebody had poured ice water down his
back. Whenever that happened she'd stop the exercise immediately, scrunch her face
in sympathy, and say "Ohhh, was that hurting you, sweetie? We can't have that now."
Nathan lived for when she'd lean over him to make his head more comfortable or to
help him straighten his shoulders. He'd drink in her intoxicating perfume, as though he
were a wine taster sniffing a glass of vintage claret. She smelled of musk and coconut
oil and tangy lemons and drop-dead gorgeous all blended into one head-whirling scent
that left him dry-mouthed with adolescent lust. If his loving but puritanical mother
knew what he was thinking during those cherished moments, she'd chuck a mental.
Sergeant Carter was all business when he conducted Nathan's physio sessions, and
when each session was over, it was pretty much a case of "See you later, kid. NEXT!"
But Amanda treated Nathan and his mum like good friends. During each session,
she'd ask them what was happening in their lives and tell them what was happening in
hers; she never mentioned a boyfriend, and there was no ring on her slender fingers,
which kept Nathan's vain hopes erect. After the session, she'd push him in his
wheelchair to their Toyota Landcruiser while having a good chinwag with him and his
mum.
Trying to converse with Nathan was a one-sided affair, but sweet, wonderful
Amanda made it seem as if the two of them were on an even verbal footing. As he was
raised into the back of the Landcruiser on the hydraulic platform fitted to it, she'd
continue to natter. The hum of the platform's motor would drown out her palliative
tones, but just knowing that her attention was fixed firmly on him, even though it
didn't have to be, made him feel like a nerd in a teen comedy flick who struts into the
senior prom with the school's hottest cheerleader accessorizing his arm. He couldn't
see her as they drove away, but he knew she was waving goodbye to them, for his
mother would be waving back in the rear-view mirror. "Bay way!" Nathan would
holler, which was as close to "Bye bye!" as he could get.
Although he tried to think of Amanda in purely sexual terms, there were times
when he got dangerously close to falling in love with her, which for someone with his
debilitating condition wasn't smart. Romance and sex were serving life sentences in
his imagination. Pretending otherwise would only lead to heartbreak. But it was hard
for him not to pretend, since fantasy had so much more to offer a spaz than reality did.
26
Nathan could see Jones going through his pre-show routine behind a rust-streaked
corrugated iron shed on the other side of the simple metal pipe fence that surrounded
the football oval where they were all gathered. Jones was weaving his head from side
to side and dancing on the spot like a boxer limbering up for a match. There were two
bodyguards with him, who were swapping bemused looks at his pugilistic aspirations.
Only Nathan had this revealing view of the political shooting star, as Jones was out of
everyone else's line of sight.
Jones stopped jiggling about all of a sudden, bowed his head as though in prayer,
took a deep breath, and walked onto the oval. The townsfolk pelted him with roars of
disapproval and language that would have made a merchant seaman blush. Unfazed
by the reception, he took to the small stage that had been set up for him and stood
behind an old plywood lectern, while his bodyguards positioned themselves to the rear
and on either side of him. Jones squinted at the modest crowd as a farmer with a voice
like a belching diesel engine called him something that rhymed with bucking
plastered. He glanced stage left and smiled snidely to himself, like Judas dreaming of
silver pieces at the Last Supper, then spoke into a microphone clamped to the lectern.
"People of Stretch," he began.
It wasn't an auspicious start to his speech. Nobody in Tulson's Stretch called the
place Stretch. They called it Tulson's or just plain old Tulson's Stretch but never
Stretch.
Dave and Noreen Truffett yelled "Get off, ya bastard!" and "It's Tulson's Stretch,
dickhead!" respectively.
Jones didn't bother to correct his mistake. As the TV news cameras continued to
record the proceedings, and political journos scribbled notes for the reports they'd file
overnight, he pressed on with his speech, ignoring the raw sentiment flung at him by
the people of "Stretch".
Nathan paid scant attention to Jones' clich-ridden outpouring of empty promises.
He was far more interested in the Jew's body language. Jones kept glancing to his left,
as though he were expecting somebody to rush him from that direction at any
moment. Then there was this thing he was doing with his left index finger. As he
spoke he'd tap the top of the lectern with it. This in and of itself wasn't so unusual, and
Nathan would have largely ignored it if he didn't pride himself on learning a new skill
every month despite the fact that he couldn't put most of them into actual practice,
except those that required virtually no physical effort, like mnemonics. One of the
skills he'd picked up from the Internet, where he got most of them from, was Morse
code. And that's what Jones was using, Morse code.
The sunlight was slowly retreating from dusk's diurnal incursion but was still bright
enough for Nathan to make out dribs and drabs of the secret message Jones was
relaying. He caught wave and it, two words Jones repeated twice.
Wave it. Wave it. Wave it.
Wave what? A flag? A hand? What?
Jones' busy finger took a breather when Mike Svenson stood up to ask him a
question. Nathan couldn't see the bearded Swedish immigrant, whose face bore a pair
of shallow disc-shaped craters, the aftermath of two skin cancer operations, but
recognized Mike's Scandinavian thrum straight away. Mike wanted to know what
everyone else in Tulson's Stretch wanted to know: when was the government going to
lift the quarantine restrictions?
This was the only point where the townsfolk fell silent. For a few seconds there was
nary a grumble, murmur, or bellowed profanity from them. Only a cricket that had
27
rocked up early for the night shift failed to observe the silence. Jones too was struck
dumb momentarily, and then a lone word crept reticently from his mouth: "Soon." It
was joined a second later by "We just have to make sure it's safe first."
"You bastards have been saying that for the past six months!" one of the farmers
roared.
Jones' index finger started tapping out Morse code again, as he responded to the
criticism with enough political spin to give his audience whiplash. He repeated the
same two words over and over again: fok choy.
Fok choy?
Nathan thought the gelatinous Jew might have been expressing an urgent craving
for Chinese food, but a straggling sliver of sunlight glinting off a chrome band on the
microphone, into his eyes, made it difficult for him to translate the code with any
degree of accuracy.
Fok choy. Fok choy. Fok choy.
It wasn't until about the twentieth repetition, with the sunshine withdrawing
westward, enabling him to see better, that he realized he'd botched the translation. The
second word wasn't choy. It was goy. Nathan knew this because goy was a word Dr.
Williamson often mentioned when he gave a sermon on the Jews, whom he referred to
as demon seed, devil spawn, sons of hell, Canaanites, Edomites, and hook-nosed
leeches, among other unflattering terms. Goy, Dr. Williamson said, was a derogatory
word the Jews used in reference to people who weren't Jews. It meant "cattle." To
Jews, whites and other non-Jewish races were nothing more than beasts of burden
whose sole reason for existence was to be enslaved and exploited by them. The first
word, Nathan concluded, was a Morse typo of an immensely popular expletive you
never used in polite company.
Jones was expressing his contempt for the assemblage of white people, to whom he
was duty bound to pander and racially obligated to lie.
Nathan considered alerting his mum about Jones' covert invective but thought better
of it. Even if he managed to get her attention, he wouldn't be able to communicate
what he was seeing. Ordinarily he "spoke" to her by typing on an iPad with a pointer
attached to a cap he wore; however, those items had been left at home, so the
revelation that Jones was mocking the beleaguered farming community would have to
wait until he got back there.
Pins and needles ran up and down his right index finger. Without any prompting
from him it started to tap on the arm of his wheelchair, ponderously at first, then with
greater speed and dexterity. It conveyed no message, unless the message was
gobbledygook, but that all changed when Nathan seized control of it and tapped out
some Morse code of his own. Jew. Kike. Devil. This was the message that sprang forth
repeatedly from his quickened digit. Dr. Williamson, who was sitting in the crowd
somewhere, would be proud.
Larry shook his arms and jogged on the spot, swaying from side to side, as if he
were moving in time to a rocking tune only he could hear. He did this before every
public appearance he made for two reasons: one, to loosen up and, two, to summon
the real Larry Jones. He, the real Larry, would be along any second now. He, the
other Larry, could feel it in his crotch.
Larry rubbed the small of his back with his knuckles; the bulletproof vest he was
wearing was making him itch. He nodded to his bodyguards that he was ready to take
the stage. The first bodyguard, a wall of muscle with a five o'clock shadow on his
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scalp, led the way. Larry followed, with the second bodyguard, who was shorter but
wider than the first and had a mug that could crimp tungsten, covering him from the
rear.
Any man, any normal, non-sociopathic man, would have been buffeted by the gales
of abuse from the inclement crowd but not Larry. He stepped onto the dais, unmoved
and unbuffeted by the storm. With the descending sun flooding his corneas, he could
only make his audience out as amorphous silhouettes, which was fine with him. He
stepped behind the microphone, glancing to his left as he did, but saw no sign of the
real Larry, who as usual was pretentiously late. Reluctantly he opened his mouth to
speak to the . . . who were they again?
While he jumpstarted his memory, he glanced to his left again and had to hold back
a brazen grin. Strolling toward him, naked as a porn queen, was the real Larry Jones.
The real Larry walked right up to Larry and goosed him with brotherly affection.
Then the real Larry stood on the far left of the stage and struck a pose that would have
got him arrested if he were visible to everybody else.
A warm, delicious feeling spread through Larry's body, as though he were taking a
long piss in a scuba diving costume. It was the same feeling he got every time the real
Larry lent him moral support at one of his public appearances.
The real Larry had been a frequent companion of his ever since the hedonist who
lived downstairs had grown an afro. The real Larry was whom he would be when he
eventually shook off the last of society's moral restraintswhat few of them were left.
As Larry commenced his speech, he caught a glimpse of the real Larry waggling
his tan bratwurst at a retard in a wheelchair. It took all of Larry's self-control not to
hurl with laughter. The brief distraction caused him to truncate Tulson's Stretch to
Stretch, an embarrassing omission the media was sure to ignore or edit out. Two of
the town's resident sheep bleated in disapproval. The real Larry spun around on the
ball of one foot, like a corpulent Michael Jackson, so his back faced them and, with
his butt cheeks spread as wide as a four-lane highway, mooned the uppity bastards.
Larry had to cover his mouth for a second to stifle a moronic giggle.
Not being able to express himself as openly as the real Larry made Larry so
flesh-tearing crazy that he wanted to charge into the crowd of grimy redneck scum
with a sledgehammer and pound on their worthless heads until their worthless brains
oozed out of their worthless ears. Whenever he got this way, whenever the urge to end
life reached the point where it was almost too great for him to resist, he actuated a
special safety valve that relieved the pressure. It was his left index finger, which he'd
use to voice silent execrations in the presence of his enemies. With fluency born of his
Army Reserve training, he began tapping obscene, racially vilifying Morse code on
the wooden lectern the a-holes had so kindly put there for him.
Like most Jews, Larry despised the military and didn't have a patriotic bone in his
body, but he did have a hankering to kill, and the Army Reserve taught him how to do
it efficiently, which meant there was less chance of his being caught. All told he'd
killed three people, though he hoped to kill many more. He'd killed plenty of animals
over the years, cats and dogs mostly, but they were poor substitutes for humans. They
were kind of fun to torture, but their inability to plead for mercy and make desperate,
teary-eyed promises left him deeply unsatisfied.
The real Larry was wandering among the crowd, brandishing unencumbered parts
of his anatomy at the more vocal individuals. He clapped eyes on a young woman in
the back row, cradling a baby in her arms, and made a beeline for her.
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What little emotion had been in Larry's voice was displaced by a lifeless monotone
as the real Larry's hijinks enticed his attention away from his audience. In Larry's eyes
the real Larry was an invisible god frolicking among mere mortals, who were
oblivious of his presence and too smug and stupid to acknowledge his existence. More
than that, the real Larry was a Jew who was as free to be as much of a Jew as he
wanted to be, and that was a whole lot of Jew.
Larry didn't know he was one of the tribe until a foster care worker let it slip the day
after his ninth birthday. Before that the only thing he knew about Jews was what he'd
learned from an old schoolyard riddle: Why do Jews have big noses? Because air is
free! He was never much chop as a student, and his Hanna Barbera looks and innate
creepiness didn't win him a stack of friends, yet he knew for a fact he was a cut above
everybody else. Something tucked away in his DNA, a biological clarion that
resounded in his soul, told him he was.
One thing was certain, it wasn't the Abo part of him that made him special. All the
Abo part of him had done was kill a few hundred million of his brain cells and leave
him as prepossessing as a humpy. And it wasn't the white part of him either. It was the
Jew part of him that made him the outstanding individual he was, the big, brash,
beautiful, bodacious Jew.
The dimming sunlight was reshaping his audience into human form. Human they
might look but human they could never be, for they were goyim. Goyim was a word
Rothstein used a lot. It meant "cattle," but the contempt that dripped from Rothstein's
senescent mouth like blood from a wolf that had torn out a lamb's throat when he used
it in private suggested it meant more than that.
A tall bastard with a Nazi accent stood up and asked Larry a curly question. Larry
didn't quite hear all of the question, because the real Larry was giving the young
woman down the back and her baby a lesson in sex ed. they'd never forgetif they
could see or feel the real Larry, that wasand he hated to miss any of the action, but
he got the gist of it and, after a brief pause that was probably on the wrong side of
brief, answered it in a manner that made him seem mildly sympathetic.
An orgasmic grin welled on Larry's jowly mush as he surreptitiously tracked the
real Larry's riotous interactions with the dumb animals that inhabited the desiccated
swamp whose name was as big a joke as the swamp itself. What the yensing hell was
a Stretch, anyway? He couldn't wait to get back to civilization and places with
normal-sounding names. Civilization, as any self-respecting Jew would tell you (but
only if you were a Jew), was anywhere Jews lived.
For a good while Larry refused to recognize his Jewishness because it seemed to
him that the drawbacks to being a Jew far outweighed the benefits. But trying to deny
who and what he was, trying to silence the yammering Yiddish voice inside him, was
like trying to turn back a category 5 hurricane with wishful thinking. Eventually he
had his Damian moment. There's a scene in the first sequel to the movie The Omen
where an adolescent Damian Thorne, having learned he's the Antichrist, races out into
the woods one frosty night and lets loose an air-curdling cry of rage, his final act of
defiance before embracing his satanic destiny. Larry's final act of defiance was spray
painting 666 and an inverted cross on the entrance to a synagogue when he was 13. He
wept afterward. It was the last time he did.
From that point on he stopped flailing in vain at the dictates of his Semitic ancestry
and was so glad he did. For the first time in his life he didn't feel like an emotional
itinerant wandering aimlessly about in search of someone or something that would
give his life meaning. It wasn't love he was looking for. He didn't have the capacity to
30
experience a profound emotion like that. What he wanted was a sense of belonging, a
sense of his place in the world. What he found was something much better, for being a
Jew meant that the world was his to do with as he and his co-religionists pleased.
Co-religionist was another word Larry had picked up from Rothstein. He was an
atheist, as was Rothstein, so he didn't see much point in using it. But use it he did
because, as with so many of the words that poured out of the Jewish elder statesman's
mouth, it was doubtless filled with hidden meaning, like a verbal masonic handshake.
Larry finished answering the tall Nazi's question. The Nazi plopped down in a huff
and grumbled about Larry's response to a toothless old turd sitting beside him, who
had a face like a cotton shirt that had just come out of a washing machine.
As the young bitch with the baby screeched about the impact the quarantine was
having on her and her family, Larry's gaze tiptoed around in search of the real Larry.
He spotted him with the retard in the wheelchair again. The real Larry was standing
behind the retard, shaking his Mongolian earth worm in time to the retard's index
finger, which was tapping a soundless melody on the arm of his wheelchair. There
was something rather familiar about the varying cadence of the tapping. Then it
dawned on him he was being sent a message.
In Morse code.
By a retard in a wheelchair.
A retard who may not be as retarded as he looked.
Nathan glanced at the townsfolk. None of them was looking his way, and his mum
was nowhere to be seen. Nor were Jones' bodyguards. That was strange, very strange.
He wondered why they'd leave Jones unprotected and why Jones' media entourage
would want to miss out on the perfect publicity shot of the golden-hearted Jew with a
poor handicapped teenage goy. It was as if he and Jones had stepped into another
world and were now invisible to everyone on planet Earth except each other.
Jones' gaze didn't budge from Nathan. "Don't worry about them. They're all busy,"
he said with a malignant sneer.
A cricket chirped shrilly from beneath the ground somewhere near Nathan's
wheelchair, as if it were warning him of the evil presence that had come to him in the
guise of a bloated Teddy bear, one that slit babies' throats while they slept.
"I saw what you were doing with your finger back there. Clever," Jones said.
Nathan twitched and snuffled nervously as the homicidal Teddy bear leaned
forward and whispered in his ear, "You're no retard."
Jones smelled like an abattoir hosed down with Brut 33. It was a miracle Nathan
didn't spew his guts out the second he caught a whiff of the diabolical pong, but he
wasn't about to give Jones the satisfaction of seeing him evacuate his bowels by way
of his mouth.
Jones straightened up and grinned. "You know, I've got a feeling about you. It's a
feeling I get around some people sometimes. Special people." He issued a contrived
chuckle. "Not special like retarded special. I mean special like really special." His grin
dissolved into a confused scowl, and his voice softened to an introspective murmur.
"There's something inside me that goes off like a Geiger counter when I'm around
people like you. It's always been that way with me." He suddenly brightened and
cocked his head at Nathan with childlike curiosity. "Has it always been that way with
you?"
The hair on Nathan's arms tried to pull away from his flesh. Jones wasn't just
creepy. He was nutsand dangerous. Nathan's own Geiger counter told him that.
31
He peeked at the townsfolk again, wishing one of them would hurry to his rescue,
though he had an uneasy feeling his impromptu meeting with Jones hadn't quite
reached its climax yet, that there was something crucial he was meant to see or hear,
and until he did he'd have to face the mad Jew alone.
Jones checked that none of the others was watching him; what he was about to do
was for Nathan's eyes only.
Nathan stiffened as if he were about to drop through a trapdoor with a noose around
his neck. This is it, he thought.
Something beneath Jones' comical facade began to stir like a demon squirming and
wriggling furiously as it struggled to emancipate itself from the spirit realm. A look of
burning febricity came over him, and his body began to vibrate so rapidly that it
became a shimmering blur. Then his countenance seemed to change into something
impossibly hideous and misshapen.
Nathan felt as if he were watching a series of overlays placed in front of Jones' face,
each more horrifying than the last, but they moved in and out of his vision too fast for
him to see them clearly. Jones' true visage lay just beyond the reach of his physical
senses but not his inner senses. With those he could see the real Jones as distinctly as
he could see the ghost gum behind the Jew, shoring up the wall of darkest blue with
its massive branches.
Jones' world-ending repulsiveness defied adequate description. If Nathan could
have screamed, he would have, and if he could have shot out of his wheelchair and
made a run for it, he would have done that too. But all he could do was just sit there
like the useless dribbling spaz he was and make a clicking, burbling, stuttering sound
that had to be the most pathetic cacophony to have ever come out of a human mouth.
The real Jones crept back into his hidey-hole, leaving Nathan a parting gift in the
form of a malevolent grin. Nathan looked enormously relieved, albeit as pale as a
bleached leper.
For a second, Jones seemed genuinely sympathetic. "That's all right," he assured
Nathan. "He's gonefor now. Can't promise he won't be back, though," he added with
a wink. His voice took on the unflappable tone of a serial killer contemplating how
best to butcher a live victim. "You know, I never saw what the attraction was with
living out here in the dirt and the dust. Too many stinking animals for my liking, and
what's there to do? But I've gotta admit you've put some zing into it. I wouldn't even
mind coming back here sometime to have another chat with you."
Grinning fiendishly, Jones brought his mouth within savaging distance of Nathan's
ear. Nathan squeezed his eyes shut, one of the few things he was able to do at will,
and braced himself.
"Ever wondered what it would be like to be skinned alive?" Jones whispered.
Nathan felt a sudden rush for his bladder's exit. A couple of drops made it out
before he barred the door.
Jones drew away from Nathan's ear and gazed across at the mix of townsfolk and
media. "Well, I reckon we're just about done here."
Nathan was thankful to see that the invisible barrier between both worlds had lifted
and that his mum, Jones' bodyguards, and a media pack were hurrying toward them.
Jones slapped on a trite smile and gave Nathan a reassuring pat on the arm, as if
he'd promised to sort out an urgent problem for the boy. "You take care now," he said
loudly enough for the approaching throng to hear.
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Nathan had been all set to tell his mum about what had transpired between him and
Jones when they got home but changed his mind at the last minute, which came as
something of a surprise to him. For days he replayed the harrowing encounter in his
mind, striving to make some sense of it. He knew its significance transcended the
loosely implied threat of his being skinned alive, yet didn't know why. So consumed
was he by the encounter that it took him a week to realize he'd been the recipient of a
minor miracle. Prior to the barbeque, trying to move his right index finger just a
fraction was like trying to play Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 with his nose,
but now he could move it without any trouble at all.
Next, Chapter 3: The Last Day of National Imperium