Enjoying the semi-rural vibrancy of our historic town before we are inundated with spew-splattered fries packaging. Nothing is more vibrant than a pussy parade! 
Don’t even think of tying your bike up here. That shit’s for Subiaco. Good DAY, SIR Lycra. 
After burning the bikes we retire – with the other menfolk – to the ‘Ling. There’s nothing quite like chowing down on a house-made Nana. I’m sure you’ll understand – and relish it! 
Another excerpt from phwoar. Tom Whitebait finds himself in Margs for a book signing.
He rolls off quickly towards Settlers Tavern, the chalkboard lists of coming attractions drawn in pastel colours of flowers, wreaths even, cast onto these slated waters, as if remembering that other surfer, that other self that could so easily have been him, taken by that sharken visitor the year before off this coast. Not that he got to surf so much these days – corporate sharks are the ones he had to look out for now, and if these dragged him under, would they still say: “He died doing what he loved?” Or would they tell him that it was his own fault. After all, he was in their realm. He could still remember doing it though, surfing. You never forgot did you? The swell slowly spasming under you like a Yank sailor’s stomach after a late night marinara on High Street. Or is he just remembering writing about surfing? And now, is there a difference?
The chalk letters resolve as he approaches the pub. Whoa! Multiverse are in town. Why not catch a few John Butler and U2 covers and tap a foot along to some spoken word backed up by a thumping tea chest bass? “Yep.” Clear the mind for this Booker assault.
The smell of mull, mead and armpit hair drifts over him as he switches into the building, like chopping off a grommet at Dunsborough, his free, ebullient and skittish bare feet almost dancing on the mat, balancing on the crest between heaven and his own low centre of gravity.
“Sorry mate. No shoes no service.” He mentally wipes out, the leg rope of his imagination snapping as he goes over the fat falls. The bouncer jerks a thumb up at a piece of laminate over the door. There is a smiley face too. Surely not here? Not Margs of all places. Nobody wore shoes here. Not even the mayor. Even the bouncer himself was bare shod!
He half smiles and tilts his head a little, so there will be no missing the distinctive ponytail and the lollop of the jowl bag – a tactic that had worked so well on that fisheries sheila when it looked like those crays he had caught off Wedge were maybe a couple of mils short of legal. But instead of the usual “Tom Whitebait right?” the bloke just glares at him. He smiles again skittishly. Why push it? It wasn’t as if he can say: “Don’t you know who I am?” Nah, they needed to recognise it for themselves after a couple of minutes of him just being the normal bloke like they imagined he had to be, no matter how they also knew it could never be true. A normal bloke doesn’t win a Booker – look at Rushdie.
Cheap tricks was what he was reduced to now, throw a couple of “fucks” into the melange of their verbal intercourse – even a “C Bomb” if conditions suited. Always helped. But it still had to creep up on them, enfold them like a greasy slick of burley and they would nose up towards the truth and the set of triple ganged hooks and too late they realised and were caught. “Aren’t you..? Jeezus, and here’s me dribblin’ shit about dugongs, and the whole time it’s Tom Whitebait!”
No worries. This bloke wasn’t to know. His loss. But as he turns to “paddle out”, the bouncer finally spits it. “ Hey, Whitebait!”
Finally! “Yeah. G’day mate. Cunt of a day, eh?”
The bouncer jabs a finger at him.“Coetzee’s going to stick it right up your arse at The Booker this year!” phwoar is just a white middle class version of Coetzee’s Veldt Grass!”
The muscles of his chest freeze around his heart like that old kerosene fridge they had up at the shack, which had no defrost, and in which the ice would crush and and constrict the space inside the freezer to the size of a quoll, hemming in that one unretrievable pack of Black and Gold fish fingers like Rasputin under the frozen flow of The Nevka. He has nothing to say, no comeback, because isn’t that what he thinks too? Despite the muse? Despite everything? When you got down to it? Two bloody Bookers and a Nobel Prize? Phwoar, Coetzee eh? But what would be the point of saying that he’d written in the talking ghost thylacine before he’d even seen Coetzee’s effort?
But he can still imagine it for himself, and it is possible, all of it. A Booker and a Nobel and a Dockers premiership all in one year. It was all coming together. And unlike J M Coetzee, he would turn up to every bloody ceremony, Man Booker, Nobel and MCG.
He trudges down the side of the building, still a little shocked by the bouncer’s visceral hatred. Maybe he should try the new small bar he had seen up the street. Merlot out of jam jars probably. But he can’t face another rejection of the bare plates of meat, and it would mean walking all the way up the bloody hill again. And he certainly didn’t want to run into Ian Parmenter.
A whistle comes snaking through the pickets of the pub’s beer garden, then a voice hard as a piece of wandoo snapping in the incinerator down the back of Mum’s place when she was burning the old man’s crap after he had shot through for the final time: “Tom, you shortlisted bastard!” It is Karen from Multiverse, although he had known her years before when she was fronting Humpback. She had been a damaged misfit, little more than a child back then, missing a couple of toes from the ill fated tractor pull that one awful Dowerin Field Day. But weren’t they all misfits? All of them in a land where they didn’t fit? Not in Asia, not the Pacific. Not anywhere? He smiles at her, taking in the unhindered breasts pushing at a tie-dyed cheesecloth – heavier and more insolent than he remembered them from her Humpback days.
“Too good for us now, are ya?” she asks. He makes a face and lifts one of his Karri logs of a leg showing the bare clodhoppers.
“Don’t worry about that,” she said. “The only one in here with any bloody footwear is my blue heeler. You remember Hamelin?” By shifting his head left and right, through the slats he can make out the elderly dog wearing little leather boots. “His pads have died in the arse,” she tells him. He did remember a young Hamelin humping his leg up at the Newport in Freo. Probably what wore his pads out, the randy little bastard. Looks past it now.
“Come on in, we got a six jug rider. “
A. Six. Jug. Rider.
TLA is wintering in the TWOP dacha in Camillo, and is now quite literally phoning it in. Did he expect me to prepare this post whne I’m 6 bourbons deep? Did he fuck. Or maybe he did, in the same way the regular newsreader never feared Peter Holland taking their job.
So he sent me some link to an interview, and I can’t make head nor tail of it. It’s here if you’ve got 2.5 minutes to spare for the country’s 4th or 5th highest circulating printmaking industry journal.
Something about adventures and size mattering. I did a CTRL+F, and there is neither juxtaposition nor hegemony. Make of that what you will. All I can take away is that 10 years of rigorous documenting of the cultural … baseline … of this city garnered what? A case of Howling Wolves? He’s finally realised that us pigs are diligent consumers of free content, and fuck all else, and targeted the lucrative couch-matching outrage industry. Kudos.
TLA is in Mandurah on special assignment. Perhaps he’ll bump into “international clairvoyant” Pam McCagh and have a psychometric test. This gruesome item is from the Community Newspaper Group. I dare you to click the link to see the pink lampshade. “PAM McCagh can be in a shopping centre, the shower or lying in bed when an unusual feeling comes over her and the urge comes.” The ridiculous in the risible. 
Couldn’t let TWOP finish without highlighting some more of our wonderful unpublished Phwoar. This section a masterpiece mainly by Alex. Has Tim ever reached these heights of literature? No. He has not. ” It’s absolutely magnificent “…the understated chandelier that hangs barely inches overhead….” Absolutely superb.
Tom Whitebait finds himself the victim of some great southern racist hospitality…
You have got to read this, it’s just so fucken wonderful. Shove it up your arses UWA press.
MWAH. MWAH.
The sound is deafening, grotesque – and now those faintly scented, faintly oily croc-fingers are clasping his elbows, and the kisses are coming for him.
MWAH! Her face surges across his field of vision with all the gravity of the Bremer Bay rolltide, every minute crease and buttery fold illumined in the halogen glare of the understated chandelier that hangs barely inches overhead.
“MM-MWAH!”
“Hi, Delph”, he manages, before Gavin’s sturdy forearm cuts in, palm spread like a hungry shark, the other one hooking round to clap against the soft flesh of his shoulder, landing harder than a Denmark dumper on the coldest day in May. Here it comes.
“TOM. HOW’S IT HANGING?”
The squeeze, excruciating, manful tendons straddling his knuckles like a wallaroo on heat, crushing him – and “Hey! that’s me writin’ hand!” And he’s reminded of late Decembers on the pontoon out past Guzzler’s old place, out where the seagrass meets with the knotty tumescence of the sunken lines in a silent, ceaseless whispering; where the whitebait dash and the bluerings scuttle beneath their bowers of ancient bone.
“Garn Tommy,” she’d said, “Get us a feed.”
And he’d tried – diving down porpoise-lithe and hungry, and not just for crays, mind you – and he’d whirled and swirled and sunk beyond his depth, giddy with the mystique of it all, beneath the waves and Becky’s shorts alike. And then, just when he’d nearly given up, there it was – the frayed old orange rope, beckoning downwards, fibers choked with flotsam, rippling slowly upward like a dugite in a drain, slimy to the touch; and as he’d hauled it up, lungs screaming, hair streaming behind him in a woylie-dark cascade. He’d felt ’em fighting back, those giant Leeuwin crays. Thrashing, hard. Battering. Fighting for their lives against the mouldering planks – and they were planks, too. That was the thing; it was one of them stout old wooden ones, like you used to see down the wharfs by Gino’s chippy, like he’s got propped up even now outside the flyscreen out the back.
And then the sides had burst, and then …
‘Wawsat? Oh, right.”
Moving up the hall, bottle in hand – but of course there’s the rack right there, no, one of many, and they’re all chockers, rows of dusty sea-green circles nestled in the burnished karri like ticks on a bobtail’s back, and he can’t see the labels, but it doesn’t look as if there’s a Palandri in the house. Till now, that is.
“Come through, come through!”
Delphine’s fingers weave through the air, adipose ferns in Prevelly mist; her aubergine bobcut clings crablike to her frame; her perfume hangs, sweet sputum in the slipstream as she saunters across the immaculate ancient jarrah and away into the great broad open room in which even now his eye is seized by a portfolio edition of his Fish Fingers, winking like the first star of evening from its perch atop a giant blackbutt barrel.
The missus nudges his arm.
“After you, darl.”
“Dukkah-crusted pearl perch,” Gav breathes, bicuspids flashing like the promontory lights down Rocky Beach, “on a bed of Donnelly River potato polenta with an avocado courgette salsa and quandong speck.”
He stands, bluff and wiry as the pillars of the Treetop Walk, his sky-blue shirt and gull-grey hair meeting in a smile as vast and scouring as the Dawesville Cut.
“The speck comes from our friends’ place up at Marrinup,” Delph announces from behind her Plantagenet. “He cures it in the old schoolhouse. They’ve redone the entire block. The most beautiful old timbers – it’s to die for.”
“And the perch?” The missus – she’s loving it – but there’s no direct reply. “So, Dunsborough Woolies. Gotcha. Smug cunts.”
He picks at the structure, trepidatiously, silver tines cracking through the caramelised spices like footfalls in the morning-frosted wrackline down at Windy Bay, where the seagrass lies rich and red and crunchy, zested flakes of blood; and you’d go down barefoot, just a few steps ahead of the sun, the dregs of last night’s boozing still adorning your jowls like rockhole brine and nothing to your name except your wetty and a pocketful of change – just enough for a Chiko and a Paddle Pop – assuming you could even wait for the bait shop to open before having to just tear into the very gorgeousness of existence itself with the full force of your appetite, like a hungry bonito.
Beneath, the soft white flesh is almost a little too supple, too yielding; it feels like falling, and he’s felt it before, that time they went out dinking down the docks – one moment’s inattention, one solitary slip of the handlebars and there he’d gone skittering over the weathered old boards and off into the drink, his icecream – butterscotch – still firm and fresh and free of melty bits, now drifting to a foaming salty death. They’d laughed, back then. But was it ever truly funny?
The perch frowns, glue-eyed. “Yeah. Me neither.”
“I crushed a Kreepy-Krauly in me Kluger.”
They’re onto dessert; boozy, uncomprehending stares.
“Wha, Gav?”
“On the way down. Busso. Some cunt dropped it in the middle of the road.”
A flash of eyes from the Delphine. (Whoops!)
“Sorry, a what Gav?”
Gav’s eyes bulge, and there’s something in the way his fingers have tightened round the stem of his glass. “Kreepy-Krauly. Y’know, a Kreepy-Krauly. The, um…”
“It cleans your pool,” Delphine interjects.
“Thanks darl,” but the look is psychopathic.
“Some cunt dropped it in the middle of the… road,” Gav trails off into an internal rage.
He and the missus glance at each other. “Well…that’s…no good, Gav…” Apparently that’s all there is about the Kreepy Krauly. The subject evaporates rather than dies, but behind Gav’s eyes they can all see the blue finned vacuum head disintegrating under the big tread of the “off roads” and hear the hiss of the Kluger’s unnecessary snorkel.
Thank God. The mudcake arrives. It lurks at the heart of its platter like a bunyip in a bog; brooding, malevolent. It is only later that he feels its soggy-crumbed punishment wending its liqueur-saturated way throughout his guts. But for now all is awkwardness and soft jazz, candlelight and jarrah, glassware and gloaming. The Kreepy Krauly all but forgotten.
Delphine’s chair squeaks across the polished boards. Coffee?
But Gav waves his hand in dismissal, still brooding.
“Yeh, ta.”
She sashays off and around the bar to where the top of the line domestic Rancilio stands droplit and majestic on its mottled granite bench. The missus joins her, and soon there is cackling, hooting and shrieking and the revitalising hiss of scorched espresso.
Gav leans in, his storm-grey eyes flushed with visible capillaries, his teeth stained dark with Xanadu shiraz, a fleck of Frankland chèvre clinging to the corner of his mouth and another on the linen collar, like the last two fingers on your surfboard down one of them killer rips just up from Smith’s where we’d all go to just splash around and sprawl in the shallows, too scared of the terminal dumpage to ever step out beyond that foaming shoreline fringe of safety. But then, of course, once the old man finally shot through and everything had changed, there you were; well beyond your reach, ribbon-kelp grasping at your ankles like streamers at the pool and the unshakeable sensation of a bronzy at your back, and nothing but four inches of styrofoam between you and your completion in the sand-swept under-gardens of the Indian Ocean, where you’d probably lie forever, covered up with coral and a rock crab up ya bum.
He leers in tighter. “Delph says we’re not supposed to know yet. Wasn’t supposed to say anything,” he grins. But, y’know, we’ve heard about The Booker, of course. Congrats.”
Gav’s hand slices down upon the table, splayed; he takes it, limply.
“The Man FUCKEN Booker nom. Big deal mate. Big deal. We’re very proud. We all are.”
“He’s fucken slurried; them Dogbolters, nipped in quick succession, intercorkage. You never mix…”
Yikes, and now the Hennessy is out.
“Er, thanks. Thanks Gav.”
“I mean it though. I mean – your stuff, man, the way you – it’s just so – you get it, you know? You really understand. You’re not just telling a story, you’re telling our stories. ‘swhat makes it so special. And now this, you know, the Vogel, that’s major league stuff man, international, and it just goes to show, you’ve put us on the map, all of us…”
“Ta mate. Booker. But ta.” It’s only me third bloody run.
“It’s like you said in the one, the one about, ahh, there’s the guy, his odd family, they’ve got funny names – you know the one. They’ve moved up the coast to, ah, ohr, um… reconnect, you know, and there’s the drought? And umm, the wheat price has died in the arse. And he has to get back in touch with, ah, what it really means…”
Again Gav seems to be fighting some internal battle, but suddenly he’s back with them. “Thylacines!” He barks unexpectedly. They used to be common here.” He braaaps, unsuccessfully stifling a burp. “Only a few thousand years ago. They reckon the a Aborigines killed ‘em off when they brought in the dingo. Which is what you were saying right Tom?” Eyes blaze. Gav must be maggoted. “That we’re not the only environmental vandals. Like it’s natural selection…The bloody blacks were as bad as us right?”
“Jesus Christ no…” “No. That’s not it at all Gav… Those Fullas were custodians…”
Delphine tries to stop the flow with a flat white.
“What the fuck?” Gav caws. Cognac splashes out of the balloon as he gestures in open armed innocence. “Why can’t you say that they killed off the fucken Thylacines? Bloody true.” But mercifully, before he embarks on some more classic South West racism, that might, with another quarter bottle run to “naturally lazy,” “inevitable extinction” or “they’re like children”, Gav again turns to literature.
“Phwoar. That Shazza eh? Hot stuff Tom. Long time since we had a bit of afternoon delight, but after reading that bit about her Perongerups…” And Delphine is embarrassed and pleased as punch at the same time.
At least they liked it. Didn’t get it, but they really liked it! Even without the fish!
Later. Tossing in bed like the Duyfken in a heavy swell, Gav’s guestroom pillowtop is hotter than January. “God, me guts again.” It’s the mudcake, for sure – all them booze-soaked crumbs, wadging up behind his bellyful of fish – and now she’s churning like the Gnarabup swash – turbulent, stormy. Choppy as the mid winter swells as a young man, coasting on the cusp of maturity like we all used to bodysurf those last few metres in from Damo’s battered old pontoon at Eagle Bay, takes his last walk along the shorelines of his childhood, his family waiting in that battered old green Landrover with only a four-dollar chips – vinegar, but no salt – binding them to that place from which they’re all too ready, like Estuary crablings in the early morning tide, to depart. But he still understands of course, still sees all that there is to leave behind, still feels the unceasing, untiring rhythm of the place, rich with billions of years of oceanic argy-bargy. Still longs to remain.
Phwoar. She’s immanent. “Now where’s the switch?”
He swings out of bed, fumbling, his shoulders battering both sides of the cedar-panelling as he surges down the guestroom hallway like a dugong going for the tube on one of them devastating reefbreakers out by… “JESUS CHRIST ME ACHIN’ GUTS…” and somehow he’s smashed a path all the way down to the dunny, and that’s that.
The night wind whistles through the bare branches above, rattling the roof; leaves hiss and scrape over the gravel by the sliding door. From the dunny he can just make out a sliver of the outside world, framed between the curtain and the glass – what would posses someone to have a full glass wall on the dunny? The hillside plunges down towards the distant treeline, silver into inky black, and something in him longs to just plunge out there himself; into the coolness and darkness, just drift away like a shortboard on the wrong side of the dump, free at last from the waxy grip of he who rides it. But that’s rash, and he’d only wake up the missus on his way out the back door.
But there’s a tingling in his limbs that tells him sleep is far from coming – and what’s the alternative? Sit here in the guesthouse dunny, with its scented soaps and rattan mats and watercolour rockpools and seashells and…
There. In the basket, mashed under a stack of old Australian Magazines, each turned, as if by some invisible expert hand, to Food & Wine.
It fucken is.
Cliché Street!
Of all the fucken places …
Cliché Street in the dunny; Fish Fingers in the lounge. There’d be a Blueball in the bathroom for sure, and a boxful of Loony Lannigans in storage somewhere too; they were that kind of people. And who wasn’t?
————————–
Amazing these graphic wraps on cars. Is Adam West even cold? I
A mini masterpiece by Alasdair. Location unknown. 
There was an emergency Security Council TWOP meeting this week, in which the smelling salts were passed around, to discuss the news Kalamunda was transmogrifying into a city. “What if this had happened after the self-immolation of TWOP?” Bento asked tersely. “Does it mean the gumnuts have to be embiggened?” TLA asked listlessly. “My mum was pregnant with me when she swam at Kalamunda pool,” I reminisced predictably, before guillotining debate. 
I’m not sure about the new logo with the gumnuts that look like ghostly teabags. I reckon the Security Council will rule a wrap over the knuckles for that. 
Young adults today are pathetic. This was the pre-lunch uni break scene in Fay’s Bay on Monday. Is it so hard to drink 500 cans a night? 
Must dash to brunch: hummus eggs with the smart set – ciao! 
Vincent B. Waverley 2024. He refused to get the silver back door. Weak. As. Piss. 
Since nobody would publish our Booker compliant masterpiece phwoar, I might have to post some excerpts here for some kind of posterity.
We find Tom Whitebait finishing the last section of the Bibbulman Track at Albany, dried Chiko Roll skins protecting his battered bare feet…
__________________________________________________________________________
…then they’re on him. All of them. Every classic book club loser. The put-upon tall bloke who gets shouted down, still completely oblivious to the old timey sexism of his comments. The housewife doing the travel writing course. The drunk cow who never reads the book but drinks two bottles of wine and drives home anyway. The know-it-all who tells everyone what the metaphors are and what the writer “really means”. The mouse who wants to be a writer and never says a word except a quiet “no thank you” to the endless, brimming tumblers of cleanskin Shiraz.
But he gives them all the small smile and signs all their bloody books, even though none of them has even bought phwoar – cheap bastards; It’s all fucken Cliché Street as usual. The drunk shoves a copy of of something under his nose and he signs it, only realising afterwards that it’s a copy of The Joy Luck Club! Might be worth something on ebay some day maybe, or was she is just too soused to know the difference?
The last five kilometres through the outskirts of Albany are a shambling blur. Worse. Ten times than the treck through the bush. Cars slow. Some of them not even Holden classics. Was there really such a vehicle as a Honda Beret? Kids gawp. His legs and feet burn, but if he goes down he won’t be rising again under the weight of his burden, these die hard Cliché Street fans with their interminable questions about the book. “Is Meat & Two Veg his real name?” “Wha?” Each inquisitor not so subtly showing with their question how their own experiences are somehow more authentic than the characters he has written about. “My grandfather cleared 7,000 acres outside Moora.” Was that even a question?
The sound of his heart in his ears drowns out the questions, the traffic, the soft slap of his Chiko covered feet on the pavement and even his own mumbling answers. The entire group, book club, kids, dogs, shoppers, tourists, growing every minute, rolling on like a ball of garbage down Bluff Knoll, grotesque plague ridden flagellants with him at the head of it all, copping the whipping. Phwoar!
Sweat drains into his eyes, outlines his man boobs plus a thin crescent at the top of his gut. He brushes through the barrier of the Golden West television cameras, the journo chick from The Advertiser doing her time in the bush before shooting through to the smoke, even the kid reporter from Dog Rock Primary School trying to get a piece to camera with her ipad. What he says to them he hasn’t a clue. From the inside he sounds like a humpback with half a dozen craypots wrapped around its nurries. But they are all smiling and nodding, and it won’t matter anyway. He doesn’t even stop. doesn’t even slow his gasping lurch onwards. Kids struggle to get the fingered joke rabbit ears ready behind his head for the cameras. Too late – he is gawn. Others are trampled by the crowd as some over ambitious piece of fartarsing for the TV comes undone and under they go. “Wipeout. Ya wankers!“
They wheel along the rail line like a scene from The Seventh Seal. Wagons of woodchips barely rolling faster towards the port than he is, hammer beside them. “Ya bastards! Ya fucken desecrating bastards!” comes a disembodied howl from deep within his watermelon neck. Thin lipped book club prudes who prefer their obscenity on the printed page pretend they didn’t hear. And still they go on.
Now they pass The Amity, an ill thought out crapulous replica of a wooden ship. Almost there. The ridiculous boat-shaped arts centre where they had staged one of his plays (Rising Lunch was it?) claws the sky. And then he sees it. Outside the old railway station, now the tourism centre – at the very end of the Bibbulmun. “Can yas see it?” A truck. A huge one, on the side written. “Great Southern Catering Services. “
The roar in his ears clears.
“You little fucken beauty. Christ, I could totally murder a mini quiche.”
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The Worst of Perth 