* * *
The last and most dangerous part of Neville’s accessible domain - excluding the Duchy, whose ground he would never trod on but including Shoomba Territory, with the unpredictable lurking presence of Terrible Bill and the possible presence of a raggedy, scorpion-eating, in-touch-with-the-invisible-world man - was Boogerville.
Boogerville was the property immediately to the north of Home Country. Its boundary ran from the Home Country stockade at the back of Rahimi’s animal shed, down a short length of tropical garden backed by high palings and through a line of shoulder to shoulder bottle brush trees, beneath which wound a broken down, step-over chicken wire fence.
Boogerville was where the Bogart family lived their raucous, argumentative smoke-car-and-music driven lives. The house was a slightly off centre double-storied cube, with a flat roof, a myriad of tiny windows and a mildewed hide, the mention of which never failed to put the wind up Mister Shoomba.
“Ass-bestos!” he’d declare. (Sometimes, when the noise levels impinged even on his peace, he’d replace the ‘bestos’ part with ‘holes’.) “Clouds of ass-bestos bein’ shaken loose by that ruckus! Every one o’ them Boogers is gonna die young - if they’re lucky enough to live that long!”
There were places in the ass-bestos where the light shone through at night and they, Mister Shoomba assured Neville, told the whole story of the Boogers, because they were the result of a gun battle that had raged there one night many years before.
“Useta be nine of ‘em, mate. Nine Boogers! ‘En one night, rat-a-tat-tat. On’y four of ‘em showed up for breakfast. Savin’ a fortune on oatmeal, the ol’ woman is! An’ that choko vine down the back? You ever seen bigger chokos ‘n’ them? Course not! Choko’s the size o’ heads because, well . . . I don’ hafta tell ye where them other five Boogers’re buried, do I? Well known fact: to this day, you get in amongst that vine, ye can feel them chokos lookin’ back at ye!”
Two of the four remaining Boogers were kids and, because the Booger-parents were almost always away working in Central Queensland’s coal mines, sometimes for a whole week at a time, they were the ones that the neighbourhood encountered most often. Hayley was a grown-up (in her own eyes) sixteen and Beau - Beau the Bum - was a mean and scrawny eleven-year-old. Hayley had her own car, a Ute, the polishing and admiring of which brought her out into the yard nearly every afternoon. Then, often as not, though she was still too young to be properly licensed, she’d speed up and down Station Street, drawing tortured squeals and clouds of smoke from her tires.
Despite the volume of her music, however, Hayley’s hours in the yard were seldom particularly worrisome to the neighbours. It was when she was not there that it became something fearful; the hunting time of Beau the Bum; Beau, who’d earned his name by his determined decimation, with his pellet rifle, of all creatures - parrots, fairy wrens, honey-eaters, whatever - that dared to venture across Boogerville’s borders. It was the one place in the neighbourhood where even Terrible Bill refused to go.
Once mum had seen Beau shoot a parrot that was on the ground with its feet in the air, drunk on fermented nectar. He’d nudged it with his foot, pondered its predicament, then shot its head off and plodded on. Appalled, she’d complained to Missus Bogart and the very next day, Mister Bogart had got out his bull whip and chased Beau around the house, cracking it around his bum, the sound ricocheting like real gunshots off the high walls.
From that time on, Beau had made himself Neville’s number one enemy, even while Hayley, seemingly for the sheer mischief of it, had made herself his ally.
“The Bum’s a vicious little cretin,” she’d told Neville. “Tell you what. See the old man’s old bus there? It’s cactus forever. But I got my own little nest in there. My get-away, see? Only way I can get some privacy, know what I mean? ‘F I tell you where the key is, when I’m not using it you can sit in it - back seat only. An’ I’ll know if you touch any o’ me stuff. But keep your head down an’ you can see what old Beau the Bum is up to, eh? ‘F he shoots any more defenceless animals, you tell me and I’ll crack his head for him, right? Or maybe get the ol’ man to whip his arse. They’d both enjoy that!”
Neville had never gathered the nerve to enter the Boogerville yard, let alone the bus. But as one should when an enemy lives next door, he had taken to studying Beau’s movements from the little north-facing window in his bedroom. It was from there that he’d identified Beau’s hunting-blind behind the choko vine, thus adding two things to his store of knowledge. One was that there was a second hiding place in Boogerville which, in the direst of circumstances, he himself might be able to use. The other was that Beau’s relationship with death was apparently close enough to allow him to be comfortable amongst the watching fruits that fed on the remains of his lost siblings.