Pepsi Bears and Other Stories Read online

  The other hotel guests are showing their approval of Serial’s dawning threesome by crashing through the foliage away from the hot tub like stampeded howler monkeys, trailing their kids behind through the whip-lash of branches, and giving the soggy triumvirate space to do their thing.

  A small-titted but foxy blonde in a bikini navigates her way through the palm jungle to the hot tub against the stampede of hotel guests. Serial scopes her up and down. This is girl number three. Three girls now. Well then, that’s four of us. This is most def an orgy, not a threesome. And no probs tit-wise, these two in the tub got that covered. And she looks foxy. Eager. Standing there alongside the tub with her hands twinkling in excitement like she can’t wait to dive in and enhance the developing situ. She winks at him.

  But then hesitates and frowns, ‘You are Serial Atlas, right? Aka Ron Watts?’ Like she wouldn’t want to climb into some nobody’s orgy.

  ‘Get in,’ he tells her. ‘For I am he. Endowed like an ibex and ready to tango. We were having a threesome. But for you we’ll flip the switch to orgy.’ The girls in the tub lift their lips from his neck and frown at this news.

  The foxy blonde with the small tits says, ‘Orgy? Okay. Hold this for me. I don’t want to get it wet.’ She pulls an envelope from the back of her bikini bottom and holds it out to him. Serial takes his hand from the panties of a groupie and brings it above the waterline, flicking off drips, and takes the envelope.

  ‘Ron Watts,’ the foxy blonde with the small tits says, ‘You have been served with a writ alleging breach of copyright in relation to the song “Ulladulla Lullaby”, property of Lurid Music.’

  ‘What? You aren’t a slut?’

  ‘A lawyer.’

  He goggles at her. Her admission has clarified nothing. ‘What is this?’ But the foxy blonde with the small tits is retreating back through the foliage, just a swish of leaves. ‘You got no tits,’ he shouts into the jungle. ‘You weren’t getting into this threesome without tits, bitch.’

  Serial Atlas rips open the envelope and skims the document inside. He has been charged with plagiarism, to wit that he did knowingly breach the copyright of ‘Ulladulla Lullaby’ and use that tune in his recent smash hit ‘Because of Oz’. He blinks at the writ in his hand, wondering if what it alleges is true. He has to ask himself. Six years in the industry banging out song after song without so much as a minor success. And now he writes ‘Because of Oz’ and it goes mega and he’s a name on the lips of strangers. Maybe he did tap into this old Maureen Whatever’s vibe. Maybe he heard her song in the nursery and regurgitated it all these years later. Who knows? Who knows, man? How do you tell if you brought something new to the world or if you’re just a parrot? Maybe I’m not Springsteen. Maybe this old Maureen sheila’s Springsteen and I’m just a parrot. Shit. But maybe I’m not. Maybe I thought up ‘Because of Oz’ from scratch. Original. All mine. And these bastards are trying to rip me off. The bastards.

  He stares at the document. Uncomprehending. ‘Me? Plagiarism?’ he says, shaking his head.

  Both girls leap from the tub on hearing this. Who knows if they’re infected already? Damn. Didn’t their friends warn them being a groupie was a shonky gig? And now they’ve been exposed to plagiarism and who knows what tests they’ll have to have and how long it might be till they get the all clear? One is cupping her hand over her crotch and the other holding her hands out, shaking them, trying to get it off. Both look disgusted. Errhh … plagiarism. Evidently, when one has been bathing with a young man infected with plagiarism one feels as if one has been splashed with the spermatozoa of a goat.

  With riches finally bestowed on her by her song, Maureen is able to up sticks and roll out of the Wintringham Hostel, where the blue-haired punk nurse exults that he will never have to unbutton her buttons again and dab at her withered limbs and confusing crevices with a sponge. ‘Goodbye, Maurs, old girl. Enjoy the high life. Wyndamere … whoo. Don’t get bitch-slapped by a duchess.’

  ‘Aarhoe.’

  Wyndamere is a petting zoo for the moribund. Situated on the higher slopes of the Dandenongs, it has native animals roving the green lawns, because old people, seen from any angle, are soppy and devoid of all sense. Infected with an urge to love something. Anything. But the children of the residents of Wyndamere are go-getters with careers and life strategies and personal trainers, and they don’t visit often and refuse to be loved at close quarters when they do. Thus the native animals stand in as surrogates and are an easy release for the love the aging hearts in the wheelchairs need to give.

  Wombats are harried from nap to nap with their ears tickled remorselessly; koalas are wrenched from saplings on the half hour and delivered into antebellum laps where they are basted with inane compliments and drool; wallabies are raked with lucerne pellets from wheelchairs; king parrots strut up and down the arms of the infirm like captains on deck; lyrebirds reproduce the coughs, gurgles and death-rattles of residents parked in the winter sunshine; cockatoos, bug-eyed on blue pills pinged at them by fallen satyrs, strut around with hard-ons whispering lewdly. It is a friendly scene.

  Maureen likes it so much she hopes she doesn’t live beyond the six months residence she has been able to pay for up front. She sits in the View-Of-The-West Day Room looking up at the flat-screen television installed high on the wall where the senile can’t get at it and lick its vistas and stroke its game-show hosts. Maureen likes to catch the mid-morning news with the nice blonde girl with the big hair and her annoying sidekick who thinks he’s suave but is a smirking greaser. Today the sun through the large window is numbing and her eyes are heavy and the news unimportant, becoming half dream. Until she hears her song being played. She looks up at the screen then. Lurid Music is suing the band Serial Atlas and The Exotic Jujubes for breach of copyright of its song, the old Australian favourite ‘Ulladulla Lullaby’, alleging the chorus of the Jujubes’ recent worldwide smash hit ‘Because of Oz’ is a blatant steal.

  Both choruses are played as the newsreader who thinks he’s suave but is a smirking greaser smiles and flicks his eyebrows up and down and the blonde pouts as if to say, ‘Oh, Serial. Oh, Exotic Jujubes.’

  Maureen Cotswold has lived her whole life watching others rake in scads of cash from her song and perform it to tumultuous applause. ‘Ulladulla Lullaby’ has been part of the nation’s soundtrack. And she has only rarely been given brief and shallow acknowledgement as its author. Treated more as a flower that inspired a poem than the poet herself. But she is a composer. A musician. She always was. Assembling and arranging notes to tell lovely aural stories has been her daily passion for seventy years. She has written a thousand songs, all dead and forgotten now, except the one that made it to the sustaining light of fame.

  So Maureen is on the side of the angels. And though on the TV Serial Atlas is wearing a greasy t-shirt and torn jeans and his slimy hair makes him look as if he has spent the night leaning over a wok in a Chinese take-away, she recognises him as an angel. Or, anyway, as a musician, a young person who doesn’t deserve to have his song, name and future stolen by a dreadful little weasel like Lionel Pavelich, who is momentarily there on the screen as well, in his light-tan three-piece suit. A little weasel with the morals of a Girl Guide. Giving her two roses and promising to protect her song from punks and rappers. She knew he had an angle. He bought her song so he could own the smash hit of the Exotic Jujubes. I just love the song. A unique beauty, a sphinx, and I always thought it would be a great privilege to own it. Liar. Pot-bellied runt-cad-liar.

  ‘Hone hehair, hoohoo. Hone hehair, here-io,’ Maureen says up at the flat screen. Which, before her last stroke, would have sounded like, ‘Don’t despair, Jujubes. Don’t despair, Serial.’

  After Maureen has watched the news story about Lurid Music suing Serial Atlas, she takes a tin whistle from the music box in the Olinda Vista Singalong Room and puts it to her mouth with her right hand, pinching her deadened lips around it with her thumb and finger. With her left she runs her index and middle finger
s over its apertures and gives a little toot. A thrill runs down her spine. Randomly parked oldsters wake from glorious daydreams with puckering mouths, angry to be back here. She blows again. A run of notes descending into lament. ‘Quiet,’ they demand.

  Yes. I can still play. Yes, this will do nicely, Maureen thinks.

  In Wyndamere you are not pushed by punks. Maureen has an electric wheelchair. In it she takes herself out the front door and along a path to the Camellia Garden, a walled auditorium where she knows a lyrebird called Barry likes to strut and perform. He is there now parading back and forth like Mussolini, his chin high. Maureen motors up to him and he hops onto the sundial before her, expecting seed and devotion. She puts the tin whistle to her mouth and points it like a rifle at his ear and plays the chorus of ‘Ulladulla Lullaby’.

  TOORALAI OORALAI HOOMPTY PUMPOO

  TOORALAI OORALAI HOOMPTY PUMPOO

  OH HOOMPTY HOOMPTY WOOSA WAZZANG

  LARBIDDY LARBIDDY OHSO YAI ANG. ANG. ANG.

  A sad and beautiful lament. But the bird looks startled. Challenged. It puffs its chest and cocks an eye at her and leans its head back and opens its beak and whines like the electric motor of Maureen’s wheelchair, such exact mimicry Maureen snatches at her joystick to make sure the chair hasn’t come alive like Herbie, the Love Bug. The bird follows this with the opening strains of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, a song it picked up on New Year’s Eve and has been singing ever since, prompting much celebration, tearful regret, and hugging among the residents of Wyndamere, along with boggled observations at how fast the years are passing and complaints about how the ungrateful arsehole kids didn’t visit for Christmas again. Since Barry has been singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’, any offspring who haven’t visited a parent in Wyndamere for as long as a fortnight may have missed as many as six Christmases and will find that parent cold and wounded.

  Maureen scratches her scalp with the tin whistle, staring at the bird. She blows her tune at it again.

  TOORALAI OORALAI HOOMPTY PUMPOO

  TOORALAI OORALAI HOOMPTY PUMPOO

  OH HOOMPTY HOOMPTY WOOSA WAZZANG

  LARBIDDY LARBIDDY OHSO YAI ANG. ANG. ANG.

  The profundity of this melody makes Maureen want to cry. But the bird replies with a kookaburra’s laugh. Mmm. This will require some large Tupperware filled with oats and sunflower seeds. Maureen heads for the groundskeeper’s cottage with the lyrebird laughing at her back.

  She writes Serial Atlas a letter. In her new hand it looks like the communication of an eight-year-old fan and Serial nearly flips it into the bin where lies a confetti of prepubescent chirpings. Only … it is on the letterhead of an aged care facility. Weird. Anyone above fifty who even knows his name would have to be some kind of nut. Curious, he reads the letter. Maureen Cotswold. Maureen Cotswold?! The woman who wrote ‘Ulladulla Lullaby’? Still alive? Offering herself as witness for the defence?

  Have you ever been to the Supreme Court in Melbourne? If not, I apologise for taking you there. An old sandstone pile with thick walls clad with timber and set about with geriatric staff. It smells of Queen Victoria. Queen Victoria dead and stuffed by apprentice taxidermists who, upon realising their shortcomings, panicked and crammed her every orifice with mothballs. Death and camphor.

  It is filled with wigged pinheads, both presiding and pitching. Some of them presumably go home at the end of the day feeling as if they have got amongst it; straightened out one or two of humanity’s appalling tendencies and cured some of the world’s injustices; quelled outbreaks of this vice and postponed the universality of that sin. And, who knows, occasionally they might have done what they set out to do. Just as a back-pedalling boy pissing at a snake, once his toes are doused and his shorts soaked and his hands glistening, might fluke a droplet onto the serpent’s back. Once in a blue moon the judges here might splash the serpent.

  In Court Seven they are locked in battle, Judge Kristen Fleet presiding; and happy to be sitting in judgment of Art, which sometimes presumes itself the equal of Law. A Professor of Musicology in a Ramones t-shirt has taken the witness stand to explain that ‘Ulladulla Lullaby’ begat ‘Because of Oz’. He has shown evidence, recorded and graphic, that the two songs are made of the same DNA. He is appearing on behalf of Lurid Music.

  His argument has been refuted by a feted composer with unruly silver hair who has thrashed his hands in the air passionately to tell the court the two songs are not only unrelated they are on whole different evolutionary branches. He has snarled at musicology, which, he says, is mere vivisection … it kills the thing it explores. He has told the court not to listen to those who deconstruct a song to discover its lineage. There are recurring tropes in all music. Who can say who begat whom? Composition is an orgy. And he has mentioned the old Welsh folk song that sounds a little like ‘Ulladulla Lullaby’. The feted composer is appearing on behalf of Serial Atlas and The Exotic Jujubes.

  The jury smile openly at the feted composer to let him know they are not fooled by his bullshit, though they appreciate his thrashing the air with his hands like Von Karajan or Daffy Duck.

  Both songs have been played to the court. The chorus of ‘Ulladulla Lullaby’ sounded like this:

  TOORALAI OORALAI HOOMPTY PUMPOO

  TOORALAI OORALAI HOOMPTY PUMPOO

  OH HOOMPTY HOOMPTY WOOSA WAZZANG

  LARBIDDY LARBIDDY OHSO YAI ANG. ANG. ANG.

  And the chorus of ‘Because of Oz’ sounded like this:

  TOORALAI OORALAI HOOMPTY PUMPOO

  TOORALAI OORALAI HOOMPTY PUMPOO

  OH HOOMPTY HOOMPTY WOOSA WAZZANG

  LARBIDDY LARBIDDY OHSO YAI ANG. ANG. ANG.

  The jury has detected a similarity. Serial Atlas, sitting front row in a sensibly low-key cowboy shirt, frowns and rubs his hands together, looking guilty. He is about to be thrashed and have his assets seized and be branded a thief forevermore by this jury if his barrister, Timothy Wheelhouse SC, can make no better impression than he has so far.

  His barrister rises and calls the defence’s last witness; one Maureen Cotswold, composer of ‘Ulladulla Lullaby’. This seems to bewilder most present. A tiny titter of gossip runs around the courtroom. (Indeed, and coincidentally, Judge Kristen Fleet is small-breasted and prone to scuttlebutt.) ‘Wouldn’t Maureen Cotswold be dead?’ the people ask one another. ‘Isn’t that song as old as the hills? She can’t still be kicking around, can she? I heard that song’s about her own life and she had a baby out of wedlock.’

  The rear door of the court is held open by a uniformed tipstaff and Maureen comes down the aisle in her chair, her eyes twitching with an effort to hold her fallen smile aloft, her chin chromed with drool. Her hair is white, but not dignified. She is wearing the cerise blouse, so hard to button, but the one article of clothing she owns that is respectable enough to do justice to, well, justice. In her lap stands a large brown bird with a fancy tail and its beak held high. Obviously a snob, the bird looks about at the assemblage as if it were made of the lowest trash and deserving of some insult. It appears to be lamenting its inability to spit like a llama or pitch dung like a monkey, whereupon it would arm itself from Maureen’s colostomy bag and rake the smirking jury from bow to stern.

  Serial Atlas is unhappy in court. He does not like judges. The first man ever to throw a boot at him was a judge. He has not met Maureen Cotswold before. His barrister, Timothy Wheelhouse SC, has told him she is their star witness, their ace-in-the-hole, their trump card. When he sees her coming down the aisle in her wheelchair with her twitching eyes and a bird in her lap he knows this is a lie. His heart sinks. My God. A perambulating fruitcake. I’m fucked. My white knight turns out to be a vegetable with a scornful poultry sidekick. Shit.

  Lionel Pavelich, of course, has met Maureen, and nearly laughs aloud to see the old thing here. He begins to calculate again the riches he will be granted from ownership of ‘Because of Oz’. It was played as Australia walked into the Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing; has been sung at both an AFL and League grand final; been
used in a Mazda advert in the USA; an Australian tourism ad in Japan; an Oktoberfest promotion in Germany; chosen as the backing song for Australia’s bid for the World Cup; and is on the soundtrack of the last Potter movie. Don’t even mention CD sales. An Aladdin’s cave of treasure. All stolen from the old tart in the chair with the chook who was too stupid to realise it, and thought she was selling me a faded rose from days gone by. Too late to whinge about it now, Maureen. You’re stuffed in triplicate, old thing. In triplicate. Three childish signatures.

  Maureen is wheeled up into the witness box by two grunting tipstaff and sworn in breathlessly by one of them. ‘Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth …’

  Then Timothy Wheelhouse SC is on his feet. ‘Your Honour, some of Ms Cotswold’s answers may need slight translation by myself, as her speech has been somewhat remodulated by a recent stroke. She is otherwise well and sound of mind and her testimony is, in any case, written and signed for us and she is here merely to swear to its veracity.’

  ‘All right, Mr Wheelhouse,’ Her Honour nods.

  ‘I have a statement made by Ms Cotswold here,’ he brandishes a sheet of paper high for the court, ‘that I would read to the court if Your Honour permits.’

  ‘It is relevant, Mr Wheelhouse?’

  ‘Provenance of authorship of the original song, Your Honour.’

  Counsel for the defence is on his feet. ‘Your Honour, authorship of the original song is not in question or, indeed, relevant.’

  ‘You will see that it is, Your Honour, if the author is found to be God,’ Timothy Wheelhouse SC responds.

  Her Honour frowns at this. She does not enjoy skiting or mystery in her court. ‘You may read it, Mr Wheelhouse. If you undertake not to press God into your defence again.’