You're in an argument.  Losing.  A woman came into the pub and asked you to buy her a drink.  She looks like Janice from The Sopranos.

"I'm sorry could you buy me a drink?  I mean, I'm just asking."

You look up from the copy of The Economist you have been pretending to read for half an hour.  After a long pause you reply.

"You don't have any money?"

"No I'm waiting for my DLA."

"What's that?" 

"My disability allowance.  Could you just buy me a drink?  I'm really thirsty."

"What do you want to drink?"

"Just half a pint of cider."

You don't like this woman.  She uses the word just too much.  Just half a pint of cider.  Just buy me a drink.  Just asking.  There are lots of things you would like to go around just asking people to do.  But you don't.  Because you recognise the fact that you are living in a society which does not care if you live or die, and justly so.

"Look," you reply, sighing.  "If you're thirsty, I'll buy you a bottle of water from a newsagent but I'm not going to buy you alcohol which is a luxury item."

"Oh, it's interesting you make that distinction.  So you must work hard for your money."

"No I don't work hard for my money."

"So what gives you the right to determine whether someone is allowed a luxury or not?"

You want to say she has by asking you, but you weren't expecting to be challenged.  You sweat, blush, stutter.  Ears lean towards your table.  They needn't, since her voice becomes louder with each question.

"So some people in society deserve luxuries but others don't?"

"I..."

"And you get to decide?"

"Don't..."

"I mean where did you get this power over people?"

"Agree..."    

"I mean it's one thing to say 'No, I don't want to buy you a drink' which is your right but to go on about luxuries shows a very interesting attitude."
  
You open your mouth expecting to be interrupted again, but she's waiting for you to speak.  She mimics your guppy face.

"I just don't agree with your position," you manage to say at last.

"Well, whatever position I'm in it's because I've spent my life being screwed over by people like you, so anyway - THANKS!"

She slaps you on the back and walks away. She asks the man at the next table to buy her half a pint of cider.  He immediately does so.

She sits directly in your eyeline on the other side of the room.  You make a show of reading The Economist for another thirty seconds as if finishing an article, before sipping your blackcurrant cordial and exiting the pub.    



   

You're in the Brisbane Botanical Gardens, trying to hunt mosquitoes.  You've exposed a whole arm as bait.  When they land, your mouth pecks at them, like a bird.  Sometimes you're successful, but they provide little sustenance and really you're just eating yourself, something you had planned to do in a few days, when you got really hungry.

Like an insatiable mosquito, the Australian economy has bled you dry.  You've spent all your money and your return flight is not for a week.  You regret now the spending frenzies in Myer Court, Happy Jacks, Pie Face, Mos Burger, 7/11.  You regret now the nights drinking schooner after schooner of Hahn's Super Dry Low-Carb beer.  You regret now rejecting the offer to stay with friends in one of the city's sticklebrick high-rises, pathological pride driving you into a Best Western, and when you could no longer afford that, a hostel, and when you could no longer afford that, the parks, to sleep with the tramps and the possums.  If only they paid...

You would have had twenty dollars but the hostel refused to give back the deposit on your towel.

In front of you stalks a Brolga, a grotesque crane with a long black beak and dirty white feathers.  Its wretched appearance seems to chime with your lugubrious mental state, until you notice the ease with which the bird picks off insects from the ground.

Two things you have learned in Australia.  It's expensive.  And the Australian slang for a ginger is 'a ranga.'

"Look fellas - the ranga just tried to make a joke!"

That's what the army helicopter engineer said to the rest of the group in the bar, in response to an off-the-cuff witticism you hadn't planned properly.

"What did you say?" you asked, trying, in a dismally Low-Carb way, to appear hard.

"It's ok mate.  You see, in the army, we pick on any weakness..."

You called him a child-killer.  It was perhaps a disproportionate response.  The good humour washed away from the table like the spilled contents of a schooner of Hahn's.  You still believe you were channelling Bill Hicks.  But you're not Bill Hicks.  You're not even a comedian.  You're a ranga, trying to make a joke.   

The mosquitoes aren't biting.  You've had two in the last hour, and one was a speck of dirt.  You thought the mangrove walkway by the river would be teeming with them.  Instead, the only signs of life here are infinitesimal crabs popping out of the mud flat.  If only there was some way to reach down.  The walkway is too high.  You're getting weak...

A Brolga flaps onto a post next to you.  Your reflexes have become lightning fast after hours of mosquito hunting, so you grip it between your hands before either of you know what's going on.  You lie flat on your stomach on the walkway and hang the bird off the edge, plunging its beak into the crab holes.  When you detect a tremor of peristalsis, you hoist the bird back onto the boards, squeeze its throat, and try to retrieve the crustacean before it has been swallowed.  But you're too late.  Every time.

After half an hour you give up.  The now well-fed Brolga flaps away with little urgency, merely repositioning itself a couple of posts down.  It stares at you, before emitting its rasping call.

"RANGA!  RANGA!  RANGA!"