Neville the Less

  * * *

  In the Duchy, the Duke was chewing over Dennis Shoomba’s foolish impulse to patrol the neighbourhood after dark. To what end? Couldn’t the man see that the enemy was already at home amongst them? Invited in with open arms? That the task now was so incredibly much beyond the peeping over of fences?

  The Duke had given, it seemed to him, an eon of thought to this problem. How to combat the insidious cancer of foreign ways. Strange clothing, unwholesome foods; noisy public chanting of we-must-dominate prayers. Why so few others saw it was a mystery too far. One could only guess that the lesson for the invader was, keep your subversion public and open; do it with an innocent look and one of those gleaming, unknowable smiles; and you’ll probably put it over them!

  But not over the Duke! Oh no! He knew for certain that all those simpering proponents of tolerance, all those rice-eating surrender-monkeys, all those do-gooder ‘Christian forbearance’ bobble-heads, would one day wake up and find their Australian Dream gone and vanished. He knew that the only answer lay in each one of them learning to see themselves as the last barnacle on the beach - sharp, strong and above all, unyielding.

  Subversion? Oh yes! He knew all about that. He’d listened to the radio, watched the television programs and read the writing on the wall. And he’d learned that the fences weren’t there simply to mark off the yards as Shoomba so naively thought; they were there to mark off a way of life!

  So far, it must be said, the Duke had been pleased with his efforts, and pleased that the Duchess had also been pleased. The sign out front made no bones about their commitment: TRESPASSERS WILL BE PRESECUTED (By Order of LOAD). LOAD, not enough people knew, was the ‘League of Australian Defenders’, the founding members of which were the Duke and Duchess themselves and the anti-symbol for which was the League of Nations which had become the United Nations which was, as any fool could see, a crock!

  As part of their defensive regime, the Duke and Duchess did a daily tour of their grounds; not in a tiresome fanatical way (leave the fanaticism to the foreigners!) - just in a casually disciplined, look, tap and nudge kind of a way. Integrity was all they were after. So that, when the riff-raff next door indulged their occasional urge to pound on the barricade, the Duke and Duchess could take that as a part of a beneficial lesson that they were gifting to those on the other side; the lesson being, you can knock, but you can’t come in.

  Things don’t always go entirely to plan, of course. On recent occasions, animals had taken to digging under less imposing parts of the fence, chasing who knew what! The dog belonging to the returned soldier next to Shoomba had recently done exactly that, in the process getting caught up and wounded rather badly amongst the sharpened stakes put there precisely to keep such creatures out. Animals, of course, can’t be expected to have the natural respect for boundaries or deterrents that people should have and the Duke, being a compassionate man, had taken this one to the vet who’d stitched and bandaged it and kept it mildly sedated for a couple of days to give the wound a chance to start healing.

  The Duke hadn’t bothered telling the owners, thinking a little worry might be good stimulus for their consciences. The dog, however, was back with him now, still somewhat drowsy, but ready to be returned on the morrow - with a suggestion that perhaps the soldier would like to secure his own fences to a more suitable standard. Not in an uppity way, of course. Helpful. Polite. Soldiers fighting over there, after all, were de facto and by default, honorary members of LOAD.

  Three further defensive measures had been taken by the Duke, the most ingenious (to his mind) being the installation of a loudspeaker system. He was waiting with bated breath for the day the prayer chants began next door as he was sure they would inevitably do. At the crack of some quiet Sunday morning. He’d seen it on television. Aiieeeeoooo! Raba-raba-raba! Whatever it was they said. On that day, he’d be flipping the switch and rattling their tonsils with an educative dose of the rawest Australian chant he knew!

  The second defensive measure was a lighting system that would, at need, light up every yard in the neighbourhood. And the last, of course, was a flagpole from which he flew the flag high and proud, every day of the year. Just the one - not the Abo’ one - the other one.

  At the moment that Terrible Bill was launched on his final flight, the Duke and Duchess were side by side scrubbing their teeth in their upper floor bathroom. The blind was drawn but the window was open just a crack, for the fresh night air; and the sound, having, like so many other things, no respect for boundaries or deterrents, came threading its way in.

  The Duke smiled a frothy uncertain smile at the Duchess and closed the window.

  “Animals,” he said, looking down at the box in which the drugged and bandaged Terrier-of-Death lay sleeping. “Let’s go to bed.”

  They did, but moments later, troubled by thoughts of Shoomba creeping about in the darkness, the Duke got up and re-opened the window; opened it wide.

  Subtly and secretively, the air of the cold front slithered in and tickled the Terrier-of-Death into wakefulness.

  Where am I? she thought. She heard the low rumble of a voice - voices.

  “What do you think it was?” said one and, “Nothing,” said the other. “Nothing to worry about.”

  And something riding on that cool air - some faint whiff of burnt hair - made Ava think of Terrible Bill. Nothing? she thought. I don’t sink so.

  Wheels in Motion

  The yards, then, were crowded with invisible presences, some living, one dead; some roaming free, one trapped and immobilised beneath a weaponised philodendron. Among those roaming free were Hayley and Afsoon. Neither had recognised the dying voice of Terrible Bill but both knew that something unpleasant had occurred, and that it had occurred in the yard of Neville the Less. Both had entered the Rahimi house from the rear and exited from the front without so much as slowing down.

  “Where’re you going?” Hayley demanded when she realised ‘Soon was behind her on the stairs.

  “To Neville,” ‘Soon declared. “Something has happened! Something has started!”

  “But your dad! Riff! He told you to go in!”

  “Yes. I went in. I was in. It’s okay.”

  “But what if it’s like . . . you know . . . I don’ know . . . dangerous or something?”

  “All the more reason!”

  “God! Your ol’ man’’ll have a conniption when he finds you gone!”

  “His conniption fills the house every day,” ‘Soon snorted as she shouldered by. “To find room for mine, I must go outside. Are you coming? We can run through Cookie Camp!”

  “No no, wait!”

  Because an intuition had begun to form in Hayley’s mind and she needed a moment of stillness to let it take its proper form. The intuition was that, whatever that cry was, it might also represent an opportunity; an opportunity to sweep away any number of neighbourhood conniptions, once and for all. An opportunity to let these kids get back to being kids and, if there was any luck at all, encourage the adults to get back, as far as was possible, to behaving like adults. It might just be the opportunity she’d come looking for earlier in the evening; a way to learn whether Ava, the missing mutt, was really incarcerated behind the Duchy’s formidable walls.

  “No. Look, you go ahead if you have to,” she said. “But be careful, eh? I’m just gonna . . . look into something else for a minute.”