Iraqi Icicle
Iraqi Icicle
29
Iraqi Icicle
Third Edition
Copyright © 2017 Bernie Dowling
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Third Edition published in Australia by Bent Banana Books January, 2017.
First edition published in Australia in 2007 by Bent Banana Books. 24 Lorraine Court Lawnton, Australia, 4501.
bentbananabooks@gmail.com. www.bentbananabooks.com
All characters are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CiP catalogue record for this book is available from the Australian National Library
ISBN 978-0-9953947-0-4 third edition eBook
Cover design: Dhrupod
Also by Bernie Dowling
My Shout
7 Shouts
WAG short stories
Inspired By . . .
Redemption: 2017 Tales from the Writers Anthology Group of Moreton Bay Region of Australia
Standalone
O Lorde
Can you believe it . . .
Sweet and Sour
Iraqi Icicle Third Edition
Maaate! Bribe-Proofing the Public Purse Against Good Blokes
Watch for more at Bernie Dowling’s site.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Also By Bernie Dowling
Iraqi Icicle Third Edition
Book One
2
3
4
5
Book Two
6
7
8
9
10
13
Book Three
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
Book Four
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
41
42
Book Five
43
44
45
46
Glossary of Australian slang
Acknowledgements
Further Reading: 7 Shouts
Also By Bernie Dowling
About the Author
About the Publisher
Iraqi Icicle
a novel
Bernie Dowling
Introduction to the third edition
THE Australian library supplier with the delightful business name Peter Pal asked me to sell them a hardback copy of Iraqi Icicle. My publishing hut Bent Banana Books had not produced a hardback edition. But the customer being always right until they are proven otherwise, it was high time for such a format. The new format meant it was also timely for a new edition in paperback and eBook. Yoo-hoo!
A new format might induce other changes.
One was the cover. I absolutely love the photography taken by professional shooter Russell Brown in provincial Dayboro on a winter morning. It has foreboding and evocative images suited to a neo-noir novel like Iraqi Icicle. Unfortunately it has no ambience of humor. So I shared my ideas with cover designer Dhrupod and he came up with a cover which is humorously sinister or sinisterly humorous.
Next I considered whether I should render the text in American spellings. Many of my book sales have been in the United States and so again the customer is always right until proven overbearingly parochial. I concede my spelling might prove challenging/ difficult/ annoying for an American reader. My novel also is replete with Australian slang, the meaning of which is rarely explained. One of the novel’s reviewers wrote: “Seriously, at one time I had dreams of going to Australia. Thinking they spoke English . . .” Glenda navigated my slanguage enough to give Iraqi Icicle five stars. In the end, I decided I would trust the generosity of most American readers in understanding why I used Austral English to complement the colloquialisms. I did change US to U.S. and LA to L.A. along the lines of the principle ‘when in Rome . . .’
As a compromise, for readers who are not so understanding of Australiana, the third addition has a glossary of the Australian slang scattered through the book.
I do like the concept of a novel with a glossary at the end, far more impressive than a map at the beginning. And slang is fun.
It is still fun after the academics took hold of it and called it argot or, worse, cant, supposedly a secret language to include/exclude strangers. British Professor of English Julie Coleman put it succinctly: ‘Using slang can operate as a kind of password.’ That definition works for academics as it implies passing between two universes which is what the professional slangologists do.
Another way of seeing slang is to look at the context of three institutions in which it is present: the army, the prison and the high school. These three can be considered total institutions, as defined by Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman. A total institution is a closed social system in which a minority group (officers, guards, teachers) tries to direct the behaviour and thought processes of the majority (enlisted personnel, convicts, students) In these contexts, slang is best seen as the language of the Resistance. Check out one of the vids for the Ramones’ Rock 'n Roll High School to see what teenage slang is about.
Finally slang is fun fun fun. In Iraqi Icicle the reader meets an array of shady characters who might on occasion have call for coded lingo but for the most part the novel’s slang is what has been dubbed ‘the poetry of the streets’.
It is no real surprise how slang enters the common language when we understand how culture drifts upwards. The underclasses with little to lose are more adventuresome in most cultural pursuits including lingual play.
As much as I like a glossary at the tail of a tale, and I remember being most impressed by Anthony Burgess’ invention of a language for A Clockwork Orange, I am not sure how a reader is supposed to use the thing. If they come across an unfamiliar word or phrase, do they head to the glossary to seek explanation? Or like me, do they take a stab at the meaning, press on and read the glossary from start to finish at novel’s end.
Smaller changes to the third edition came from my being impressed by colloquialisms which really should have been in the second edition. One example is how Australians by and large do not say okay but quite a few do say akay.
The Australian expression with all the versatility of okay is ‘all right’ though it is pronounced as one word, awlright, and I have rendered it as such.
Similarly, I have rendered yer or yeah as yair which I have a notion was how it was written in dime westerns. You can call this my homage to American style.
Enjoy Iraqi Icicle, third edition. It is not quite a text from the neo-noir crime school. There are no exams.
– Bernie Dowling Pine Rivers district of Australia,
January, 2017.
For Trish, Kevin and Daniel
and
In memory of the Go-Betweens’ lyricist/ bassist
Grant McLennan
Born summer, 1958
Died autumn, 2006
Iraqi Icicle
Watch the butcher shine his knives
And this town is full o
f battered wives
...........................................
They shut it down
They pulled it down
They shut it down
They pulled it down
Round and round, up and down
Through the streets of your town
Everyday I make my way
Through the streets of your town
Brisbane rock band the Go-Betweens
Where I grew up there is an annual picnic race meeting where the people from the surrounding cattle stations come and race their horses and relax. Whenever I'm there I get asked to play some songs but I find it really difficult because I don't know any of the songs they like. If I play my own, especially the early ones, they say "do you know any with a tune?" (much laughter)
Grant McLennan in conversation with Nick Cave, 1993.
Even as I approach the gambling hall
as soon as I hear
two three rooms away
the jingle of money
I almost go into convulsions.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Gambler
Book One
At play
1
Brisbane, late spring in November, 1986
‘YOU WOULDN’T KNOW anything about this Brisbane Handicap fiasco, would you Hill?’
Would I ever? Kidnapping, deprivation of liberty, extortion, supplying illicit drugs . . . I was looking down the barrel of a minimum of fifteen large at the tender age of twenty-one. I would be lucky to be outside the nick for New Year’s Eve 1999.
‘No, Boss, I don’t know anything about it,’ I said meekly, staring into the face of the chief steward of racing, with a bloody great copper standing by. On the few occasions any of us got to meet the chief steward, we always called him ‘Boss’. I’m sure another name is on his birth certificate, but, for our purposes here, he is Mr Joe Boss.
Mr Boss waved the copper out of the tiny office, saying he would call him when he was needed. As the copper shut the door, Boss stood up and leaned forward, spreading his fingers like two fans onto the table. He made a great effort to give me a look of utmost sincerity. ‘I’m sorry about what happened to your mate, Clarence. Is it true he rang up the Canterbury stewards and abused them for ten minutes for moving the barrier stalls five metres after a sudden downpour?’
It didn’t seem important any more, but I wanted to give Mick Clarence due credit.
‘It’s true, Boss. Mick stood to win ten grand on a horse beaten by a nose at the Canterbury midweeks,’ I said. ‘He’d worked out that his horse was a certainty, even though it was paying twenty-to-one. He told me he had calculated it would win by a head or so.’
‘How old was Clarence when this happened?’ Boss asked.
‘I guess he was about seventeen at the time.’
‘What, was he crazy or something? How could moving the barriers five metres have changed the result of a six-furlong race?’
‘Mick wasn’t crazy,’ I said evenly. The chief steward let me go on. ‘Well, maybe he was just a bit crazy, but he was a mathematical genius. After he gave the stewards a prolonged blast, he redid his sums with the barrier moved five metres, and it came out that his horse would get done by a nose rather than winning by a head.’
Boss looked at me in disbelief across his desk. ‘You’re only a baby, Hill. What the fuck are you mixing with these lunatics for? What do you think’s going to happen to you?’
‘I haven’t done anything, Boss. Is this about that mad Russian?’
___o0o___
Brisbane, two weeks earlier
MORNING PEAK-HOUR traffic in Brisbane plays as a slow and noisy industrial carnival band: engines on vocals, the bass of tyres on bitumen and wind on bonnet. The horn section cuts in without notice. The whole show is a cacophony of nose-to-tail metal, lit by strobing brake lights. I ponder this musical analogy to dull the torture of the inane pop song on the car radio.
I’m sitting in my Holden EH ute, an elbow out the window, the other hand on the leather steering wheel cover. This baby’s a vintage beauty, lovingly cared for over the years by a fastidious copper, who would tear around all day in his police car and then come home to polish and oil his pride and joy, ready for a leisurely Sunday drive up and down, round and round Mt Mee.
That was the beloved routine. Until around midnight, a month ago, at an illegal card game, the red ute changed hands, due to the copper being a few beers worse for wear and my steadfast loyalty to three eights in the face of a probable ace-high straight.
Now the crimson beauty is mine, all mine. The ute’s already not quite what she was; there’s a little rattle coming from the back that I’m sure wasn’t there before, but there’s plenty of leg room, enough even for my long angular frame. With the driver’s window down and the breeze scattering my longish straight blond locks, on the rare occasions when the roads are free of congestion, I am commander of the streets of your town. But not today.
I insert my pirated tape of the Go-Betweens 1982 single Hammer the Hammer. That’s all there is on the fifteen-minute cassette, Hammer the Hammer. I foolishly tilt my neck to the left to see what is causing the delay. There is no cause. If there were no delay in the morning peak-hour traffic, there would be a cause. I am crawling along Sandgate Road in the metal parade of stiffs, fantasising murder, suicide and all shades in between. That’s the stiffs pondering all that morbid stuff. Me, I’m a placid sorta bloke.
I notice a teenager sprawled across the footpath ahead. He is wearing black jeans, an unbuttoned denim coat and, under it, a black T-shirt with a graphic below a band name I cannot read. Sitting on a brick fence behind the prone body are three other teenagers, two boys and a girl. All wear black jeans; one has on a black T-shirt and the others flannelette shirts, in the middle of a boiling hot Brisbane late spring – it would pass for high summer in most countries, but not in Australia.
The trio on the brick fence aren’t looking at their prone companion. They keep glancing down the road. My bet is they are not seeking a cop car. Drug overdose, smack or speed, I reckon. Take your pick, as I’d say the young bloke, flat on the footpath, did. I hope his mates are watching out for an ambulance they have called.
A bag of fruit is walking down the street with his nose inside a plastic folder. He glances over its top edge, takes in the prone body, and pretends to be lost, backtracking down the concrete path and turning into a side street. That is what you call going out of your way for the unfortunate.
I duck down the one-way Frodsham Street at Albion to save a second on my journey. I would save a few seconds this way, but savvy stiffs are following me or leading me down Frodsham Street to save their own precious second. For stiffs, every second counts. By stiffs, I mean the clock-watching, bored and boring sods who do what they do because that’s what they did yesterday. Experts of all persuasions are lining up to convince them they are time-poor, and in need of greater efficiency. Me, I have plenty of time up my sleeve, but I am not letting the stiffs better me by my going the long way round. My life is extended by a second.
A few hundred metres on, I get stuck in a traffic snarl beside Bogan Street. Ever since I left the orphanage, I have met teenagers and young adults who dream of escaping Brisbane to Sydney, Melbourne or London. For them Brisbane is Boganville, full of unsophisticated young Bogans living squalid lives, unenriched by the gifts of youth culture.
Me, I like Brisbane. I am on my way to its inner-city suburb of Spring Hill – the Go-Betweens wrote a song about it – to see Mick Clarence, the bloke who taped Hammer the Hammer for me.
I had fruitlessly scoured Brisbane underground record shops for a copy of the single. Promises of imports never came through. Then I thought of Mick. He was using American military spy computer programs to pick the winners of horse races, so I figured he could track down a copy of the single, and he came good.
The tape was still rewinding when I heard a siren in the background. I hoped it was an ambulance for the ill lad. I can never tell the difference betwe
en a police siren and an ambulance wail. I don’t want either coming for me.
Mick had asked what else I wanted on the fifteen-minute tape. He smirked. ‘What about an album by the Ramones?’
I replied, ‘nothing.’
Mick, true to his word, left me with the one short song, alone in a world of static, which no one could quite figure out the meaning of.
2
Brisbane, summer in early December, 1989
IN MY BOOK, theatre is a foreign country. The only Greek tragedy I know is Australian television’s alleged comedy Acropolis Now. Which is why I pretended to be mesmerised by the form of the horses for the Dalby races when Natalie spoke.
‘You’ll have to go to Bub’s opening night, Steele.’ Nat often speaks in absolutes. There are facts and there are instructions. I kept my head down, searching desperately for a dead cert for Dalby and a way out for me. The last thing in the world I wanted was to go to some play. Especially if Bub was in it. Nat’s little sister and I had pretty much exchanged only frosts since I refused to help Jane – Bub’s formal name – paint her room. Black.
Now, you will say that anyone born Jane is entitled to adolesce into art, gothic-rock music, theatre and a black bedroom. I would be the first to agree with you, but I reserve the right of refusal to be an accomplice. A hard-nosed handicapper of horses like me is entitled to a tiny travelling satchel of the gambler’s basic baggage: superstition.
Natalie repeated her order for me to attend the theatre. I had that dull ache in the pit of my stomach that attacks me when I lose a photo finish, or when a domestic looms from a corner of the lounge. Strange how fighting words erupt when a blue is the last thing you want. ‘I heard you,’ I growled, though I knew there were extremely long odds of me winning this blue.
‘There’s no need for that tone,’ Nat admonished, in a beautifully modulated tone of her own now that she had me on the defensive. ‘I can’t go to Jane’s opening night because I’ve got a three-day managerial course at Noosa. I don’t want to do the course, but I have to. You know how the juniors are breathing down my neck at work.’
Yair, I know. Life in 1989 is tough for a 21-year-old assistant manager, fruit and veg, in a large supermarket chain. Sometimes – quite a lot actually – I’m grateful that I haven’t had a regular job since I was warned off all racetracks for life, over what everyone, including punters who don’t know what the word means, call the Brisbane Handicap ‘fiasco’. Good to know your partner is always there for you when you are short on vocational stress.