Pepsi Bears and Other Stories (20 page)

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 fingers 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'.

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.

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:

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

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.