I.
Annie and I are backstage at a Hollywood film and television awards show. Rumours have spread to the producers that the Queen will be in attendance, so everyone’s very excited. People in headsets are rushing around us and I can hear the broadcast booming and echoing down the halls. It’s our job, Annie and me, to give a brief and amusing address to the audience as representatives of Australian arts and culture. The producer is this bald man with bulbous eyes and lizard-thin lips. ‘You’re a natural talent,’ he says, and pats me on the shoulder. ‘Don’t sweat this gig tonight, you’ve got the charisma of a young Alec Guinness and the looks of Archie Bunker on a bender.’ He practically shoves us out on the stage. The lights out there are so bright, you can’t make out the crowd. There's a brass band playing as Annie and I cross the length of the stage and stand our marks. ‘Take your mark, look the other guy in the eyes, and tell the truth.’ I heard that James Cagney said that once. I thought there’d be a teleprompter for us or something, but it’s just a sense of total darkness between the blinding lights. They roll clips of classic Australian films on the enormous screen above us, and some unseen announcer reads out their unfamiliar titles. I glance over at Annie, she’s busy beaming a perfect showbiz smile into lights and there’s an applause coming from the crowd. One of the films shown on the screen above us is called ‘The Langoliers’. It gets a huge cheer when the clip plays. From what I can tell, the movie looks like it’s about a bunch of fat kids pole vaulting from tree to tree in a computer animated forest. That’s when a joke occurs to me. A pretty good one, I reckon. Soon as it’s my turn to speak, I’m gonna say it. The little bald producer gives me a signal from the side of the stage which means ‘talk now’, and so I say my joke into the microphone: ‘Is there anyone else here who thinks that movie, ‘The Langoliers’, is just the feeling of falling off a cliff every thirty seconds? Because I relate to that feeling right now!’ There is silence. I glance over at Annie, and she is now looking at me with an expression which I can read very clearly. Her expression indicates that I will never again see her naked. Worse, I suddenly realise that all the other jokes I’ve planned are about bushfires and earthquakes and shark attacks. I’ve now been standing here in silence for at least ten seconds of dead air. The producer is making a new signal at me. He is making his hand look like a gun, and he is pointing the finger barrel at me. His lizard-thin lips are pursed, and he is mouthing ‘pew, pew, pew’ from the side of the stage.
II.
These days my wife and I live in the country. We own a property just a ways inland from Coffs Harbour. We keep some pigs, and chickens, and one or two dogs depending on the time of year. We have our own beehive too, but the bees are all dead. My wife has a secret lover in Spain. His name is Antonio. It’s a secret, but she takes some strange pleasure in letting me in on it. In subtle ways, you understand. We never address it directly. The other day I saw one of the dogs carrying a chick in its mouth. He could have crushed it and eaten it and nobody would have noticed, but he walked right across one side of the property with this little chick in his mouth and just plopped it down near the coop. I said, ‘Hey boy, come here.’ He came right over with his big old tongue hanging out. I was sitting on the bench we keep on the porch and he put his head on my knee and just let me rub the top of his snout while he made a few squishy noises with his tongue. There are two shotguns in the shed and about two hundred rounds and I could easily take my wife out with a shot to the back of the head and feed her to the pigs. Least, I’ve heard of people doing that, in the movies and such. Still, that’s just bitterness talking. I don’t want to kill anyone, least of all her. Instead, the alarm goes off in the morning and there I am, heading down to the fence-line with my shovel, so that I can fight off that damn cougar that’s always trying to sneak into the yard. Some mornings he puts up such a fight I think he’s gonna get the better of me. He shrieks when he sees me coming, the wide black mouth of his, and these terrible fangs and his yellow-eyed stare. That is, until I give him the greatest whack across the whiskers you ever felt in your damn life. Sometimes I think his skull is gonna cave right in when I get him good enough. I’d kill that son of a bitch if I could, but somehow, he always manages to skulk away just when I’ve got the upper hand. And then he’s back every sun-up, regular as morning dew. I keep meaning to Google ‘How to Finish Off Cougars on your Property’, but it usually slips my mind soon as I’m back at the house. Course, I know this can’t go on forever. It’s just, I’m not really sure how to bring all this to a head.
III.
One of my cousins convinced me to sign up for that reality television show, ‘Married at First Sight’. It was a bad idea, but I’ve went along with worse, so it didn’t really surprise me when I got talked into it. The wedding was alright. One of the bride’s sisters was a great big fat woman though, and my side of the wedding party kept pointing and laughing at her, which embarrassed me terribly. My wife’s name was Mishel. ‘Nice to meet you, Michelle.’ I said. She said, ‘No, not Michelle, it’s Mishel.’ I was sweating like a glassblower’s arse after that faux pas. You don’t get many chances to make a first impression with your wife on reality television. And boy did I blow mine. There’s no denying that Mishel is what most men would call ‘a good woman’. Her hair was done up in a kind of blonde nest on the wedding day. It had these pins in it, kinda like chopsticks, or big toothpicks. She had too much make-up on, but someone told me that was only because we were on television. You forget the cameras are there after the first little while. I think Mishel and me could have had a go at it, being married and all, but after the wedding she confided that some drug gang was gunning for her, on account she’d testified against her ex and landed him some hard time. The whole ‘Married at First Sight’ gig was just something the witness protection people had cooked up. They called it their ‘Hiding in Overt Sight Protocol’. That didn’t sound right to me, but I told her I’d been talked into worse things myself on occasion. She begged me not to tell the producers what she told me next. She said first chance she got, she was going to steal a motorcycle and tear arse all the way to Grafton. ‘What’s in Grafton?’ I asked her. ‘A fresh start for Mishel,’ that’s what she said.