It was early summer when Butch spotted the empty warehouse, right at the edge of town past the airport and the sewage depot, encroached by mangroves as they inched landwards from the sea.
‘This’ll do us won’t it girl,’ she said.
She roughed Bitch’s head, and soothed her pointy ears. Bitch sniffed at the air with her long snout. In the bright night her profile was that of a wolf. Butch’s shadow beside her was heavy as a granite outcrop.
Butch sniffed at the air too. There was the malodorous note of the sewage plant they’d passed and overlying that the smell of dead eugaries, rotting fish, seaweed and the insistent stench of old tyres.
‘Lots of good smells girl,’ she said.
Bitch wagged her tail and smiled.
The warehouse was one of a group, but ‘hers’ was the smallest – just an ordinary looking spec-built shed with a big roller door at the front and no windows to break the façade. Round the side was a set of little steps and an office door. Butch shone her torch through the side window. It was as she thought – couple of jerry-built internal walls – dusty waiting room, cobwebbed store-room, bathroom, set of steps leading down into the cavernous space of the warehouse. Inside it would be mostly the shed – perfect for all her gym equipment. She walked back towards the road where her dusty ute was parked, grabbing the ‘For Sale’ picket as she went.
‘In,’ she said opening the passenger door for Bitch, and throwing the sign in the tray before the two of them headed off, fish-tailing along the gravelly road with a roar of tyres and a trail of smoke.
There wasn’t much to becoming a local of Boggy Creek – the town’s few streets didn’t exactly form a community, more an assortment of the disengaged. Those inhabiting the rundown houses were about as hungry for purpose as the streets themselves, all of which began robustly from the pub, but quickly tailed off into the swamps all around. So if Butch had a past, no-one was interested. And if the town had secrets Butch didn’t want to know. She may have been a feared ‘corrections’ officer at Wacol but what happened in the jail stayed in the jail.
‘Doncha get lonely living by yourself out on the blasted heath?’ a couple of old blokes asked, in spite of the signals of her buzz-cut and bulked up biceps. They were the sort of chancers willing to try their luck.
‘Nah,’ she said. She hawked and spat into the spittoon/ash tray on the concrete floor. ‘I got Bitch. She’s a girl, see.’
On cue Bitch growled low in the back of her throat and let her hackles rise, just enough to be noticed. And Butch winked at the old blokes so they’d get the hint quickly and leave them both alone. She and Bitch had the routine down pat. Bitch was a one woman dog anyway.
At night, after the pub shut, the two of them often roamed the wastelands in the dark, ‘wilding’ Butch called it. She knew how Bitch loved to let loose, plunging into the sea or chasing a cat or a possum or sometimes even a snake. Occasionally Butch came across a couple making a bit of a racket in a car. The area was a good place for adultery, or for a bloke who might like another bloke as a change from the missus. People drove all the way out from the city just to get it on around the sewage stench and primordial mangroves.
‘Hey Bitch,’ it was always fun to yell in disturbance of some moment of intimacy. ‘Git over ere.’
Or sometimes Butch shone her torch through a windscreen, not for a perve, just she liked to unnerve the occupants. They were people already scared of being followed.
Mostly when she wasn’t at work Butch was in her gym. After putting down exercise mats, and getting resistance bars installed, Butch’s stuff arrived in crates and boxes. A couple of big blokes brought the heavy equipment in through the roller doors and arranged it for her. The warehouse had plenty of room for her 25 kg flywheel rowing machine with 5 tension levels; elliptical cross trainer with heavy duty magnetic flywheel; the 22km 6.5 hp treadmill with 20 incline levels and the spin-bike with 3 piece crank and 14kg fly wheel. To one side were the Olympic weight plates and barbells/dumbbells she trained with every second day, and the beautiful Cervelo racing bike she used on the others, with Bitch in high speed pursuit.
Soon Butch was what she wanted to be, just another one of ‘the boys’. She joined their all night poker games, shot ducks and pigs, and helped out if one of the trucks got bogged or a two-stroke wouldn’t start. Of course Bitch always came along too. The boys loved the joke, the same way Butch did.
‘Yo Bitch, back inside,’ they’d yell. Or ‘Bring us another tinny Bitch’ - things like that.
One thing she didn’t join was the fishing trips. A couple of the blokes had got together and stumped up for an old 4 berth trawler. She was a 44 footer with a 1.6 metre draft and a wheelhouse draped in old sheets to keep the glare out. After a bit of a paint job and a name change (Carpe Diem) they fished the bay most summer weekends for mackerel, snapper and sweetlip, bringing the spoils home to grill at the tiny park barbeque next to the pub.
Butch and Bitch joined the revelry but they never went out on the water. And it wasn’t because Butch couldn’t swim or had no sea legs, or was modest before the guys, as the others variously speculated. It was because boating was the thing that she and Sandy had always done together, out on the water at night, trade winds blowing a steady 5 knots and the occasional squally shower cooling the night as they lay together, sighing under a blanket and a waning moon. That was when Butch had been Maureen and her dreams had been of other things.
There were pictures of Maureen and Sandy together, some of them on the winged ‘Duchess’ in Butch’s bedroom but no-one ever went in there except Butch. And no-one imagined her room to be anything other than the khaki, concrete and iron arrangement the rest of them favoured. Most people slept in their sheds, leaving the ute out the front with a dog tied in the tray for protection. They kept the roller doors up to catch the onshore breezes (never mind the various smells that came in as well) and because, well, by the time they got back from the pub it was all they could do to fall into bed of a night.
In Boggy Creek household furniture came with wheels. Anything needing a good clean was pushed into the yard and hosed down. By contrast Butch’s bedroom was a haven of duck egg blue. The king-size bed had a padded suede headboard and ruffled bedcover in broderie anglaise, the corners gathered together with a little navy bow. There was also a comfy seat at the ‘Duchess’, a seat so curved and ornate it looked like a miniature gondola with its blue padding and carved oak frame. This was the furniture Maureen had bought for her future with Sandy, the future that had never happened.
One of the blokes, seeing a picture of Maureen in Butch’s wallet had once shyly asked, ‘That one of your girlfriends love?’
And she had shaken her head without explaining that it was actually her. Mostly the only comment allowed about Butch was ‘good luck to her’, and even when Butch wasn’t around, ‘lez’ jokes had become taboo. That was because Butch, with her high intensity interval training, and the nose piercings, and the studded wrist bands, not to mention her life in ‘security’, added considerably to Boggy Creek’s amenity. The blokes could lurch home with a skinful and pass out on their old shearer’s beds knowing Butch and Bitch would come by on a nightly patrol. Butch made everyone feel safe.
As a young girl Maureen had dreamt of a conventional life, one with children in it and a settled partnership with someone who loved her. She also had an un-spoken urge to give other people orders, something she didn’t enunciate to herself until much later, when she went into ‘corrections’. At the beginning she’d trained as a teacher. A large framed photograph recorded the moment, of herself standing proudly with Dad, diploma on display. Maureen’s fair hair was fine and long, her figure slim in its light blue cotton dress. That was the day before her very first class and her face shone with pride.
‘Yes, I’ll take the Gold Coast,’ she’d said, not understanding that this might mean classes filled with kids living out the scrag ends of their parents’ broken dreams. There were families for whom a rented caravan was all that lay between them and a home in the family Valiant. And there were children who slept on the beach, peddling their bodies for a feed and swiping car keys from the bundled towels on the sand. They stole whatever they could flog off from the big SUVs that lined the foreshore.
Maureen’s notions of family had been shaped by her father’s steady clerkship in the Transport Department, and even more by her mother’s tyrannical rule as a lollipop lady. Family life for Maureen had meant discipline, and she along with her class-mates had watched, year after year, as Mum strode out into the traffic, ‘lollipop’ aloft, cowing even the noisiest of hoons into an orderly queue of V8s. Mum was a woman of substance, whose yellow safety vest kept order from blocks away, until one awful day the worst happened and the lollipop didn’t protect her.
After that it was just Maureen and Dad, sadly avoiding one another in what had once been Mum’s warm and noisy house but was now an empty shell. Maureen studied hard, making a worthy if unimaginative student, and getting by with Credits and just the occasional conceded pass. Without siblings her view of life came to be like her father’s – one of service and reliability. It was this future she had imagined as sharing with Sandy.
The two of them were teachers, although Sandy, with so many more years in the business was no longer the optimist Maureen still was. Sandy’s class-room was ‘managed’ so the kids were scared into staying away, or if they came, sitting still and listening. Such discipline and control reminded Maureen powerfully of her mother. It was something she admired and aspired to. Sandy had a stout mesomorphic body enhanced by body-building and with short black hair that looked dyed but wasn’t.
Outside the well-disciplined class-room Sandy led quite a different life, one that was about being on the Gold Coast and having fun. It was on Sandy’s houseboat (moored on the Nerang River) that Maureen learned about sex and its many variants. She also learned a lot about drugs. Sandy mixed ‘recreational’ drugs (coke and mushrooms) (ecstacy and alcohol) heightening the sex apparently, not that Maureen knew enough to tell.
‘Christ you’re a babe in the woods Maureen,’ Sandy said then. ‘I must be your guardian angel.’
And it was true. Maureen really was very innocent and Sandy protected her by being so strong and disciplined.
Although Maureen was old-fashioned and didn’t approve of drugs she did approve of Sandy and Sandy seemed to approve of her. They went to the gym together and Maureen began her weight training. And Sandy talked about how to control a class just with disdain and how to hurt kids, just a little, without leaving a mark. Maureen was Sandy’s disciple in everything, until it all changed on the day Maureen’s class made her cry. It was in a ‘shared class-room situation’ and for the first time Sandy saw the whole shameful debacle Maureen had kept hidden.
The shared class had been Sandy’s cynical idea.
‘Let’s combine music one afternoon – we can laugh as the kiddies try to freaken express themselves.’
To Sandy the kids were all losers.
‘They all reckon they’re the next Guns n Roses. Ha!’
The two of them sniggered at the idea any kid in that place would ever amount to anything. But Maureen still hankered to be a ‘seize the day’ kind of teacher whose kids remembered her til the day they died. That wasn’t the way it was though. She’d let the kids get to her, suffering their sotto voce taunts with a weak smile on the very first afternoon she’d gone back to her car. By the next day they’d let the tyres down. And by the end of the week her room was mayhem. The kids yelled to one another. They even rang each other on their mobiles and talked loudly about her while she struggled to maintain order. Sometimes they strolled right out of the room to sit in the sun and gossip together. Boys showed each other phone porn in the back of the room and got the girls to pose for more pictures. Maureen prayed they’d take pity on her for just the one afternoon, just while Sandy was there.
As the senior of the two, Sandy did a stint at the beginning, staring down a few rough boys and getting them all to sit still and pay attention. That was for the talk about self-control, how music comes from the discipline of timing and harmony, and that good team work and good practice make for good music. The kids seemed to like that, hardly plucking at their guitar strings and not whispering to one another at all. Once Maureen took to the podium with her baton however, they changed. There was the usual insolent snickering from the girls as Maureen spoke in her high girlish voice. Boys began strumming off-key chords and even un-tuning their strings to worsen the cacophony.
‘Hey you! Quiet!’ Sandy yelled a couple of times. ‘Sit up and listen to your teacher.’
But the quiet that followed was ominous, like the eye of a cyclone, and after a short while the din began again. Sandy soon stopped trying and just talked on uselessly, into the storm of noise.
Towards the end of the lesson a paper plane curved into a long glorious arc through the draught of the doorway, landing gently at the back of the room. Soon the air was a ballet of paper planes. No matter how Maureen tapped her baton and raised her arms and called for attention, the music trickled to a stop. Then a plane bearing a sharp weighted tip was thrown directly at Maureen striking the wall behind her with a ping. This was followed by a barrage of others. Maureen covered her head with her arms and elbows and hunched down, trying to avoid being hit and begging the class to stop. She didn’t start crying until something struck the side of her face, just below the eye. And that was when Sandy brought her nightmare to an end.
‘All those in my class get back to your form room and wait for me. The rest of you kids – go to the library.’
Maureen sobbed at her desk, a trickle of bright blood moving slowly down her cheek like a tear. That day she left her job, moved back home to her father and began her project fulltime, of not being Maureen. The only bit of her that was left now, aside from the Duchess and blue ‘gondola’, was her voice. Butch’s voice was high and girly, no matter how she tried to deepen it.
So when a bit of pressure was needed to urge a stray ‘visitor’ out of Boggy Creek, it was not Butch’s commanding tones that induced a change of mind. In fact her threats often prompted an opposite response:
‘Tell you what love. Give us a good go at ya, then we’ll leave.’
The sarcasm stopped the minute Butch and Bitch loomed beside them in the darkness. There’d be a hasty turning of ignition keys and slamming of doors as cars took off, heading back towards the twinkling lights of the oil refinery and the ship repairers, back to civilisation.
One night Butch was woken by a racket just outside the high wire gates that closed off her ‘compound’. Bitch was running the perimeter, barking and snarling. A ute had parked where the street petered into the mangroves, and in the headlights an ugly scene was illuminated – several male persons (Butch automatically thought in ‘police speak’) had set upon another male person, now on the ground. There were shouts, guffaws, yells and a lot of kicking and swearing.
‘Poofter bastard.’
‘Eat a vegemite sandwich next time.’
Butch took a long torch from the door, and strapped a webbing belt over the black sweat pants and singlet she slept in. Then she clipped Bitch to her lead, adjusted the belt with its weight of ‘tools’ (can of mace, hand-cuffs, rubber truncheon and fake Glock) and slipped through the gate out into the darkness.
A man lay on the ground, arms curved over his head, knees drawn upwards as he wailed piteously for mercy. She watched as the kicks and punches rained down, listening to the cries for help and the ugly crowing voices. How well she remembered her own moment of ignominy and the pathetic bleating of her own pleas for mercy. Just as a steel capped boot was poised to stomp the victim’s head, and a petrol can brought from the tray of the ute, Butch stepped forward, one hand poised to unclip Bitch from her leash, the other hovering above the receiver of her ‘Glock’.
‘Fucken cowards – let him go,’ she said.
Before they looked round one of the lads laughed.
‘You and what army,’ he mimicked in a high voice.
‘Meet the army’ Butch said, unclipping Bitch then firing the ‘Glock’ into the air. It didn’t sound real but these twerps were raised on Hollywood special effects. They were like the loser kids in her old class – they knew diddley squat. As Bitch, teeth bared and hackles on high alert, positioned herself to leap, there were screams of fear.
‘Give em a few of your love bites Bitch,’ she said, laughing at the pleasant sound of bullies begging for mercy.
‘You’re a fucken lunatic,’ the driver of the ute screamed while turning the key so hard the engine screamed too.
‘You better believe it,’ Butch said. The ute accelerated away, leaving a straggler in its wake.
As Bitch gained ground there was a panted yell of ‘Cunts’ floating on the fresh sea breeze, and the disappearing roar of an engine.
‘Back here Bitch,’ Butch called, leaving the idiot to get out of the place anyway he could. There was no moon to speak of. Any luck and he’d wind up in a swamp.
She returned to the man on the ground, prodding him gently with her boot.
‘Come on mate,’ she said. ‘You can get up now.’
‘Christ almighty,’ he said, shutting his eyes against the dazzling 3500 lumen flashlight. ‘Who the hell are you?’
Butch smiled.
‘Let’s just say I might be your guardian angel,’ she said, her hand out to help him up.
‘Maureen?’
She’d recognised Sandy even sooner, and her heart had begun beating just as fast as it always had, even though Sandy’s tough muscular body was looser, and his face softened. It was also bloodied and torn. She put a hand to the torn skin.
‘Come on, I’ll fix you up,’ she said, leading him to her inner sanctum, to the padded blue gondola, where she tweezed the dirt and asphalt out of his skin and wiped it with .
Sandy put a hand on her thigh, testing the muscle.
‘I’ve often wondered how you were,’ he said.
Butch held her arms wide, proud of the cut torso and chunky arms and thighs and Sandy let his eyes roam over her thick body, the army pants and lace-up docs and the muscular biceps bulging from her Jackie Howe singlet. Then he put a hand up to stroke her cropped hair and massive neck.
‘And now I know,’ he said.
