Pepsi Bears and Other Stories (14 page)

Despite the parishioners not believing Old Ms Harris quite deserved a place cheek-by-jowl with the Lamb of God, they do appreciate her sacrifice. Having listened to Father Gould's eulogy they believe a saint has walked among them. They recognise her foresight and her clarity. She saw shit where they saw sign and, by giving up
her life, she was able to pull the scales from their eyes so they too could see shit. They want to thank her. Not just in prayer, but in perpetuity.

Many of them have been up to Melbourne at least once and seen the statue of St George slaying the dragon, the fanged beast lanced but striking up at the armoured warrior, his horse rearing. Good defeating Evil with every new rising of the sun. And they have seen the statue of Archbishop Daniel Mannix, God's first Australian champion, his punishing gaze weighing like a month's penance on any passing Catholic. They petition the Church that Martha Harris be canonised and propose a statue of her be placed in the grounds of the church. They imagine that woman as Korumburra's glory, cast twice life-size, her back somewhat straightened, the truth somewhat bent, smiling in victory with her foot deep in a defeated bronze turd.

Father Gould, having to live among these people, does not fall about laughing as they present him with their petition. The Church hierarchy in Melbourne, naturally enough, does. They roll on their flagstones kicking their sandals in the air and delight at the innocence and gullibility of their rural flock. Those parishioners, they tell each other, they are our strength and our shame. They are our lifeblood and our embarrassment. They are fools and sheep.

The request for canonisation is immediately binned by a laughing Bishop Fairall. He is glad to see it gone for its extreme hilarity has caused in him a worrying lapse in bladder control that spots his vestments and makes
him late to bless a bridge. A message is sent via Father Gould to tell the flock a sub-committee of patriarchs has been raised to put the petition through the proper rigours of examination. The proper rigours of examination are not to be rushed.

Indeed. There is a village called Falluriah in southern Spain that has waited since 1905 for the beatification of the man who drove a gang of evil spirits from the place by performing a Blessed Week of Cacophony in staying awake for seven days and seven nights using the ingenious method of putting sand crabs in his underwear and cocaine in his sangria and keeping those evil spirits from alighting in their favourite haunts by banging pots whenever they were ready to alight or his scrotum was nipped. And Ernesto Madjik will look handsome in bronze, if they don't portray him snatching at his crotch and crying out in pain, for he had a strong jaw and thin hips.

In the village of Clarbec in Normandy, France, they await the beatification of Francois Jilbardt, a wine-glutton who in 1896, while wandering home from his local cafe at midnight, doused, with his limitless stream, a molten meteorite that had crashed into the convent, thus saving the nuns of Clarbec from a fiery end.

These triumphs, though no less heroic than many others that have been rewarded by the Church, are more socially difficult. Thus the villagers wait on, year after year, for their heroes to be canonised and their reputations enhanced and their streetscapes dignified.

Add to these villages the town of Korumburra. For
she now waits to be acknowledged and celebrated as the birthplace of Martha Harris, Australia's newest saint, and she looks forward to that spinster's second coming, in bronze. Her inhabitants often speak of that future day when they will have their heroine standing true against the sun for the young to squint at in wonder. They are not impatient. They know their case is strong.

A
t dawn on September 19, 1994, the megapods on the slopes of Tavurvur abandoned their nests. Dogs in the town began barking incessantly, scratching and sniffing the earth. Along the beaches sea snakes came ashore. These dread portents of Matupit folklore were enough for the population of Rabaul to flee their homes through the copra plantations into the jungle and be saved.

Later that day Tavurvur blew a billion tons of ash into the air and as it rained greyly onto Rabaul buildings began to collapse under its weight, making the death of the town sound like a slow artillery duel. By nightfall this place of gardens and groves was entombed. The tips of power poles poked from the ash showing where
streets ran below. Occasionally a roof jutted above the grey flood, and the customs house, which had been three storeys, was now two, its first floor now at ground level.

The Hamamas Hotel was buried, but its owner saw only new beginnings. Standing above it, leaning on its steeple, draining ash through his fingers, he told his manservant Expendable Buloo, ‘Fetchim olgeta onetalk bilong yu na rousim ol dispela trash.'

Mister Bruce was born a pharaoh in Queensland. But Australia being an effete country, its governance codified and sanitised, he was forced to search the world for his Egypt. He found it in PNG, where there were no laws against making oneself omnipotent. The people Mister Bruce enlisted to be his Egyptians were the Matupit, a purple-skinned clan from out near Bougainville who were bewitched by his use of high-explosives, firearms, poisons, quarter-horses and Rottweilers, his victories over crocodiles, and his ingenious work in artificial insemination using the copper coil from a gas fridge.

It takes the Matupit a month to dig the Hamamas Hotel out of the ash, while Mister Bruce rides among them on a quarter-horse like Lord Carter, handing out barley sugar and taking potshots at second cousins of rumoured looters. Just as the excavation is complete he encounters two pigs browsing on Mango Avenue outside the hotel. He dismounts and tells those pigs to go ahead and make his day, and when they don't he tells them to fill their hands with lead and calls them sons of bitches, before trouncing them in a gunfight and donating them, along with a ute-load of beer, to the Matupit
for a thanksgiving moomoo. At the height of this revelry of pork and SP Lager, as the Matupit are a Christian people he bribes the police to let them into the local lock-up to reason with sinners using a smorgasbord of martial artistry learnt from Jackie Chan repeats. Typical of Mister Bruce, and a kindness the Matupit whisper about for years.

Once disinterred the Hamamas stands like an oasis in the desert, surrounded by a desolation of tree trunks, twisted metal, corrugated iron humpies and wandering Matupit with ash as fine as talc rising at their every footfall. Across Rabaul a shanty town of salvaged materials is pieced together by the locals. But still the ash continues to fall. God's greatest chimney stands above the town, and every day a potpourri of sulphur and pumice rains down. Nothing grows. The tourists don't return. If you visit the Hamamas for yum cha, within an hour your vehicle will resemble a rhinoceros in its thick grey hide.

Before the eruption Rabaul's lifeblood had been American tourists. But the hotel has few paying guests now and is losing money by the day. Still, Mister Bruce, his wife Suzie and their daughter Rosie remain. Because if Tavurvur goes to sleep, if the ash stops, the town will rise again, its greenery unfurled. Paying Americans will return to this famously beautiful place and the Hamamas will once more be a resort. They hang on. Tomorrow, or some day soon, the ash will stop. It would be a tragedy to cut and run, only to have the ash stop and the town come alive. So, one more week. One
more day. Tavurvur must stop. For ten years they hang on as the ash falls.

What could lure cruise ships of moneyed Americans to this wasteland? What could raise this city out of the ash and place it up again before the eyes of the world alongside Paris, Venice, or Mooroopna? Mister Bruce, President of the New Britain Tourism Board, wrestles with this problem day and night. Rosie emails The Wiggles, but the tropics being no place for men in skivvies they decline a residency at the Hamamas. The keys to the city are jangled before Mr Bernie Ecclestone, but perusing Google Earth he sees no F1 circuit in Rabaul and stays faithful to Monaco.

With a hundred other festivities turned to dust in his hands, Mister Bruce falls back on that most proletariat of self-inflicted major events, the Fun Run. He decides to hold a marathon. Like Boston. Like London. Pamphlets are nailed to a thousand coconut palms and he is chauffeured up and down the coast in his Landcruiser to advertise the run through a bullhorn to startled nationals as he speeds past. ‘Yupela all pippia heads, come huddy up na wokim Fun Run.'

He has captured a 21-foot-long Vickers, Sons & Maxim six-inch coastal defence gun stolen by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore and shipped here to defend Rabaul against the Sixth Fleet. A great virgin piece, which once crouched in Singapore lusting to spit hellfire at Japanese battleships and then crouched in Rabaul lusting to spit hellfire at American destroyers, now sits hunkered and edgy out front of the Hamamas, designed for, deserving,
and awaiting a World War. Mister Bruce is going to use this gun as the starting pistol for his fun run.

He mixes a batch of gunpowder using heat beads, sulphur and potassium nitrate in a PVC canister and inserts bare wires, positive and negative, nestled into steel wool. Expendable Buloo tamps the charge down the barrel of the cannon while Mister Bruce absents himself horse riding. On top of the charge he instructs Expendable Buloo to pour petrol and coconuts and scrap-iron. An extension cord leads from the gun to the Hamamas' kitchen where all Mister Bruce has to do is flick a switch to start the race.

Outside the Hamamas at seven o'clock on the morning of the run, while Expendable Buloo blows a trumpet, Mister Bruce lobs three-hundred pairs of flood-relief Nikes into the crowd from the back of a ute. These shoes are distributed among the Matupit via a contagion of scuffle and affray until six-hundred people, some bleeding too badly to run, have one shoe apiece.

Having never worn shoes at all, the wearing of only one Nike is a tricky initiation into modern athletics for the Matupit. The crowd of men staggers and limps in circles – amazed, struggling to hold a straight line, delighted as they curve off the road and crash into each other, as though travelling under the instruction of some hilarious djinn. They giggle and shout, ‘Lookim legs belong mepella,' proud to be the most deeply
bewitched, exaggerating the bias and spasticity inflicted by their single Nike. Reporters flown in from
The Cairns Post
and
Papua New Guinea Post-Courier
begin taking photos while Mister Bruce swears under his breath.

Five minutes before race time he hushes the crowd from the back of the ute and delivers a carrot-and-stick pep talk while brandishing a scad of cash in one hand and a shackled felon in the other. He has borrowed the felon from the police lock-up to use as a prop for this speech. Two possibilities confront each man here today, he tells the crowd. Glory (he waggles the cash) or disgrace (he lurches the felon this way and that by an ear). Glory (waggles cash) or disgrace (lurches felon). Having linked sluggards with criminality and thus given himself licence to dream of Pan-Pacific records being smashed, Mister Bruce goes back into the kitchen to flick that switch.

The gun belches a zeppelin of flame and blows scrap into the air, cutting the high-voltage power lines which fall among the Matapit whipping and striking and spitting sparks while the crowd heaves and leaps as one animal to avoid them. Instead of heading off in a single direction, as athletes might at the start of a fun run in New York or Melbourne, the Matupit radiate like light from a star, howling like labradoodles afire, holding their heads in their hands, shedding Nikes in their wake. Some run off the dock into the harbour, some run for the church, some run for the jungle, and some who haven't mastered the single Nike run widening circles toward a dream of safety. A smell of burning hair hangs
on the morning breeze. The felon lies alone in the ash, smoke rising off him.

Nobody has fun. The felon is delivered back to the lock-up hairless, nude and blistered. Laughing at his complete deforestation, the police happily demand an extra carton of beer for his usage. Many of the athletes don't re-emerge from the jungle for months. From time to time they can be seen peeking from behind trees, wondering how they stand with Mister Bruce.

Electricity is out across New Britain for two weeks. But if this bothers any Department, Bureau, Commission, Agency, Official or Authority then they don't mention it to Mister Bruce. Half the bigmen of PNG think it a divine right of pharaohs to discharge artillery in the CBD. The other half regard his antics as Acts of God to rank alongside earthquake, lightning, tsunami and volcano. A burden to be borne, like malaria or leprosy.

Finally, two truckloads of linesmen come from the New Britain Electricity Commission to string new power lines. They work fast under the sullen eye of the great gun. When they have finished they stare up at the lines and then stare at Mister Bruce's gun, which is itself staring angrily at the new power lines. Some of them feel a feeling that is just short of despair and some of them feel a feeling that isn't.

For his part, the only flaw Mister Bruce can see in what he calls ‘FR1' is trajectory. So he recalculates a trajectory
beneath the new power lines and has Expendable Buloo and a gang of Matupit chock up the rear of the gun on bricks, and when this is done he announces the Second Annual Rabaul Fun Run to a reluctant public with his bullhorn and pamphlets. Safety arrangements are discussed and assurances given, and the prize money from FR1, being unclaimed, is consequently doubled for FR2, which lures many retired athletes from the jungle. As a safety measure Mister Bruce rigs up the extension cord so he can start the race by inserting a male socket into a female socket while standing right alongside the gun, having cleared a firing zone through the crowd.

By the morning of the second run Mister Bruce has surrounded the dangerous failure of the first with so much fanciful justification, people have come to see it as an aberration rather than a template. The Matupit are blaming God for sabotaging Mister Bruce's meticulously planned event and are keen to admonish Him and absolve Mister Bruce by participating in a triumph. An air of solemnity hangs over the runners. They all want to do their bit to make this a memorable day. A thousand barefoot Matupit men limber and stretch stony-faced, staring off into the distance where fate, Mister Bruce's congratulations, and two-thousand kina beckon. None have forgotten the proven link between dawdlers and criminals.

Women and children laugh and dance and sing songs. The women, like women everywhere, are not expecting their man to triumph. Dark-skinned schoolboys with blond curls sit astride the gun like parrots
on a bough. Utes pull up in front of it and drivers stare down its maw to inspect the coconuts and crockery. People blow horns and set off firecrackers and chant songs while they wait for Mister Bruce to come outside and start the race.

Expendable Buloo wanders, pensive, frowning. He is a youth trusted with much and doesn't like the air of frivolity among the women and children here today. Upon first adopting Buloo as his manservant, Mister Bruce had told him ‘expendable' was an Australian word for ‘prince'. Given this honorific Expendable Buloo has understandably come to look down on his people. He has given up betel nut to make his teeth white like Sachin Tendulkar's. And he, above all others, would hate to see another disaster here today. With his arms folded and his eye sharp for error he wanders the scene, pokes at the bricks with his toes, slaps the mighty barrel of the gun, aligns his gaze along its length to assure himself one more time it is directed under the power lines and through the crowd. Wandering up the side of the gun he discovers the female and male extension sockets lying beside each other in the dust. ‘Harrhh,' he points at them. Then waggles his forefinger in the air up alongside his head. ‘Mepella onepella goodpella man.' For here is another of Mister Bruce's oversights poised to ruin the perfection of the day. He picks up the male and female socket, one in each hand, thins his eyes at them, swivels them, smiles to see the three prongs line up with the three slits, and connects them.