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!"    

You're at a wedding.  It's not yours.

You went to school with the groom.   He spoke to you twice in five years,  once to ask  for a chewit and once to inform you that you had the personality of a boiled potato. 

Last year, you happened to be in the same pub when he leapt on the bar to announce through a gobful of MDMA and Magners that he was getting married and everyone in the room was invited.  

At the reception, you recognise various alcoholic crones from the pub, along with a withered gypsy who had come in to sell flowers.  She clutches a bouquet of champagne stems while pawing the imitation flora on the mother of the bride's hat.  The mother of the bride wafts her hand away like it's a moth on benefits.  A smile fractures her face.  She addresses some bona fide guests.

"All these people!  Dan's such a character!"

She turns to her daughter.

"I hope there's enough champagne."

"I will tell thee," interrupts the gypsy.  She grabs the bride's hand and wrenches it up to her face.

"This be your champagne line."  She scratches the palm with a nail.  "It will last.  And this be your marriage line.  My, 'tis strange..."

"What?" asks the bride.

"Thy marriage line says you're already divorced."

She vomits on the hand.  The bride begins to cry.  Her mother signals an usher.    

"Cut the cake.  Now."

The groom bounds over.

"Best wedding ever?" he asks, before frowning at the tears and vomit.  His mother-in-law, shielding her distressed daughter, spits in his face.

"Fool." 
  
You're glad.

  


  

You're in Pizza Express.  You've been waiting over ten minutes for a menu.  You don't need one.  You've been coming to this nationwide chain pizzeria every Thursday afternoon for ten years and have always ordered a La Reine.

Here's a staff member at last.  Unfortunately she's an attractive twentysomething Balkan waitress.  You therefore cannot possibly express your customer indignation in case it jeapordises the chance of a future relationship with her, a chance that still exists because she has not yet heard your soporific and monotonous voice.

You watch her approach across the expanse of restaurant like a yacht in a desert, her face nearer, nearer, until it's looking down at you, smiling.

"Ready?"

She's in a good mood. 

"A menu would help."

The smile drops like a recovering heroin addict's first shit.  She spins and recedes from view to collect a menu from the other side of the restaurant.  She chats with the Polish pizza chefs for a minute and checks on a couple of other diners before returning.

"There you go."

She slaps down the menu and turns to walk away but you stop her.

"I'm ready."

You pick up the unopened menu and hold it out.

"La Reine and a coke, please."

She accepts the menu and smiles again, but now it's more like a twitch, a tic, an echo of the tense smile she used to placate her baby brother during the Croatian War, crying in their dead parents' crumbling apartment, as the shells fell on Dubrovnik...