Nobody's Fault, Derek Haines [mobi reader txt] 📗

has Irish, Polish and Jewish jokes. Perth has Vic jokes.
Apart from the mind set of the population, the place is outwardly normal. To the visitor it is a beautiful place to holiday. Beaches, sun, exotic wildflowers in spring. A sparkling city built on the banks of the Swan River. Almost rebuilt entirely in the money making days of the seventies and eighties, its tall glass and concrete towers can be seen by its inhabitants for miles. At night, from the trendy restaurants of South Perth, the lights of the cityscape dance in the still waters of the river. The reflections of every light symbolising the wealth that has been mined from the rich earth of the state, and all these jewels are on display in the night dance of the Swan River.
It is a tribal group that live here. Tribal battles are fought on the green grasses of sporting fields. The main battles are fought out mercilessly on the football field or the cricket pitch. In 1992, this tribalism came to fever pitch, when the local football team reached the Grand Final of the National League. This was the chance to defeat the dreaded Eastern Staters on their own battlefield. Now, sport has a following all over the world, but Perth must be the only place where a single football game would stop a city completely. The day of the event, the last Saturday in September, produced an eerie city. Not a soul was away from their television set. Roads, streets and major freeways were deserted. The main street of the city was populated by a couple of Japanese tourists looking as if they where the last survivors of a nuclear holocaust. Shopping centres closed. Nothing moved. The city died for those three hours.
Every single inhabitant wanted the blood of those Victorians. And blood they got. Perth won in a thrilling game. They had defeated the dreaded enemy. On the final siren, the city exploded in celebration. The type of celebration reserved for the end of major world wars. To the people of Perth, this was bigger than any world war, and they celebrated for days, weeks and months. In most other places in Australia, this victory hardly rated a mention. In Sydney it occupied six lines in the Sydney Morning Herald. Hidden somewhere next to the greyhounds and country trot results.
To the rest of the country, Perth is the city where people always want to go to, but never get there. In other cities, it is the place that you can never quite see tomorrows weather forecast, because the weather men in all other places in Australia stand in front of the map just where Perth is located. Its location is a convenient place for weather men to stand, because their little pointers can point to every other city from there.
A very long way to the east of Perth is Australia’s largest city. Sydney. Originally claimed by the British for use as a penal colony in 1788, it has grown from a small colony of convicts, gentry and police, to become a thriving metropolis of four million people. The ratio of convicts, gentry and police seems to have remained unchanged over the years! Another interesting fact about Sydney is that it took only a few months, from the time Captain Arthur Phillip landed with the First Fleet, to totally pollute the only water supply. To this day, the problem has not been rectified.
Sydney is a brash city. Fast. Aggressive. Dirty. Beautiful. Disgusting. Cultured. Loud. Greedy. Adventurous. Busy. Lazy. Everything for everybody. Bound by famous sandy beaches to the east and the Blue Mountains to the west, it is a city of activity. Two parts of the city, North Sydney and Sydney City are joined by the world’s largest replica ‘coat hanger’. It is an engineering marvel. It carries across its span, hundreds of thousands of cars and hundreds of trains every day. Hidden beneath the harbour it spans, is a tunnel carrying yet thousands upon thousands more cars, with drivers who pay their same $2.00 toll to cross the harbour, but pass on the spectacular view. Maybe they have seen it once too often.
Sydney is the home of the Sydney Opera House and The Love Machine. The Opera House being the height of culture, and The Love Machine being a famous club in King’s Cross. Located only a short distance apart, they make for an ideal night of entertainment. Shortly after enjoying the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at the Opera House and the privilege of paying a paltry $120.00 or so for a seat, it is only a short $5.00 taxi ride to the Love Machine. Both events are timed so you don’t miss a thing. When the last round of applause has finished at the concert, the best strippers are taking the stage at The Love Machine. The expensive champagne of the Opera House is replaced by exorbitantly priced cans of beer in the Cross, but once you are pissed, who cares. If you are still awake at 2.30a.m., you will get to see the live sex onstage that has been promised by the spruikers to every passing soul since 8.00pm. It is worth staying awake for. If you like comedy. Some poor pissed idiot is lured to the stage by something that resembles a naked female. Once there she yanks down his trousers and discovers ‘brewer’s droop’ as she has every other night and tries in vain to make it into something useful. The crowd have a laugh, the poor idiot will have forgotten it by the morning, and the ugly stripper takes a bow and disappears behind the tatty curtains of the stage. Once the poor idiot has hoisted his trousers up, it's your cue to go home.
When you do, you will encounter a Sydney phenomenon. At 3.00a.m., just when the entire entertainment and party scene of Sydney disgorges its human contents to the street, every Sydney taxi company has a shift change. Every single taxi in Sydney returns to base to change drivers. This presumably involves a chat with the new driver over coffee and scones, because it is well and truly 4.00a.m. before they reappear. If the police could organise the same arrangement, this en masse exodus of drunken, singing, vomiting party and club goers could drive home promptly without fear. But, being as it is that the chances of being caught for drink driving are bloody good, everyone waits patiently on sidewalks from 2.30a.m. to 4.00a.m. Pointlessly hailing taxis that are returning to base and have no inclination of stopping is the only way to pass the time.
The greater Sydney basin from Newcastle in the north, to Wollongong in the south, to Katoomba in the west is home to nearly one half of the population of Australia. This fact in itself ensures a city that has its own self propelled economy. It also has self propelled poverty and crime. Self propelled pollution and filth. It also has self propelled wealth and greed. Sydney reeks of opportunity, smells of garbage.
It is a magnet to many types of people from both within the country and without. Four out of five immigrants to Australia choose to settle in Sydney. Many people relocate to Sydney from other parts of Australia. As the rural heart of the country disappears, the cities swell. Sydney swells the fastest. Some come for the opportunities Sydney has to offer. Some come to hide in the enormity. Some come because there seems no other place to go. Three men from Perth are attracted to this vast metropolis. All come with hope in their hearts for a secure and prosperous future. They will all find what they are looking for, and more. It is the more that they will have difficulty with.

II
David

Born in a small country town sixty miles east of Perth, David James Holdsworth began his life in 1956 after waiting for the local town doctor to come home from the picture theatre. He was ready to take his first breath, but somehow got stuck on his way to freedom. No doubt this was an unpleasant wait for his mother also. His passage to freedom and his first gulp of air in the middle of a loud squawk was assisted by the recently arrived doctor, and a pair of large forceps. David had waited impatiently for his freedom. In some manner the die had been cast for his life. David’s appetite for freedom would never be satisfied. He would never feel freedom as he wished it would feel or appear. He would spend an indeterminate amount of his life chasing freedom. The seemingly irrational urges to run, to escape, to flee, to be free that David would undergo during his life would be difficult for those close to him to understand.
David was a quiet boy. The type of baby that leads first time parents into a false sense of belief that child raising is easy. He was a normal baby who cried to be fed, to be held, to be changed. But he did not do as most babies do and cry for no obvious reason. This is what drives parents to distraction. David was easy to understand. But only as a baby. As David became older, he became harder to understand. Every year that passed led David’s parents further away from understanding their son.
David’s father was a carpenter. A simple hard working and honest man. His mother stayed at home with her child, and later children. Their life was not blessed with more money than was needed for a simple lifestyle. But they were happy. Until the work ran out in the small town. The town was dying. It was time to move on. The city was not an attraction for his parents, so David moved with his mum and dad to another larger country town three hundred miles north. Arriving at the age of four, it was here that David collected his first memories. Memories to build on through life. As he would discover later in life, some memories are easy to carry. Others become emotional baggage, and weigh one down heavily.
School was interesting to David. He thrived on the inter activity with other children. Being an only child, the company of other children was something David adored. Most were attracted to his warm personality, but this is not to say he didn’t stand up for himself and have the odd school yard fight. They were few and far between though, and his win loss ratio was about even. He was developing as a normal young boy. During his first few years of school, his marks were good. Always, near the top, but never right at the top. He was little trouble to teachers. The type of child who can be overlooked because they don’t need attention.
Behind his house, through an opening in the paling fence, was a small shop. The owners had built the shop on to the front of their house. They had two children. A boy and a girl. The boy a little older than David. The girl a little younger. The three became close friends. They played together after school, and their respective parents always knew they would be at either house, or somewhere in between. A few trees in David’s backyard were a favourite place for the three. Collecting and having races with cow beetles was a standard game. It didn’t matter if they were playing with a train set, cowboys and indians, cops and robbers, or with a tea set and mud cakes, the three were inseparable. Being children of course, they were not complete angels. But apart from one little game with matches under the house, and the resulting panic attack with the garden hose by David’s mum, and numerous cuts, abrasions