The Way of the Pear

Chapter One

The Dream

She said 'before anything, the world was silent, flat, dry. Goorialla, the rainbow snake came down from the sky and forged the great dreaming tracks across the southern continent, Goondwanaland. The trenches she had cleaved became beds for giant rivers and the displaced rock was thrown skyward to become great mountains. Tiddalik the frog had been collecting rain water in his belly for some time. Having been told a particularly funny joke, he laughed heartily releasing the water which tumbled onto the land, filling the great crevices created by Goorialla. It is not written, it just is.'

Brisbane, 1959

I remember pictures in the sky. No kidding. I am standing in a car as big as a boat. It's dark and fresh and the stars are as high as an elephant's eye. The car has no roof and I am standing up on the red leather seat so I can look over the windscreen at the pictures in the sky. I am allowed to do this, I am definitely allowed to do this. It may have something to do with being only four and not having any shoes on which is normal for Brisbane. Up in the sky there is a boat and in the boat there is lady and a little boy. The lady is singing to the little boy. The song is coming out of a box that's hooked to the window of the car in which I am allowed to stand up on the red leather seat. The lady in the big blue dress is singing,

Whenever I feel afraid

I hold my head erect

And whistle a happy tune

So no one will suspect

I'm afraid.

There's a king and everyone's afraid of this king and I'm afraid of this king and then the king is dying and everyone is crying and not afraid of him anymore and I'm crying and I'm not afraid of this king, that I don't even know, anymore.

Minjerribah, December 1978

High tide came at 1am and we slipped anchor at Chelmer, heading out to the mouth of the Brisbane River. The Sea Nymph was nearly thirty feet long, a gorgeous, gaff-rigged yacht built in the thirties. Her grandeur was tarnished by the ravages of beer and barnacles but she was pretty sprightly all the same.

Chugging down the still of the river, hedging around the napping city and out into the chops of Moreton Bay, the sun shook the day awake. It was my job to negotiate the channel, glued to the depth gauge. Two feet, eighteen inches, twelve inches. I was seeing the bottom. The channel's as thin as a pencil. Don't let it go below six inches or we'll get stuck as the tide fades. All clear. Two feet, four feet. The channel began to widen. We were under sail.

On this boat there was no baggage. I took the tiller just past St Helena and someone handed me a tinnie. The others were sprawled out naked or nearly so on the ample bow, fully trusting, sweetly trusting. Behind, two sharks followed. They had buckley's and they knew it. Nothing better to do. Thing was, no one had anything better to do than sail and drift and dream.

The sun was fading as we reached Minjerribah, the Aboriginal name for North Stradbroke Island. There on the shore was the tiny black woman with the piercing blue eyes. She was the poet Kath Walker. Later she adopted the Aboriginal name of Oodgeroo, meaning paperbark. We had, as planned, successfully guided the Sea Nymph to Moongalba, tribal land of the Nunukal. It means sitting down place. Kath paid a peppercorn rent to the government for this former patch of crown land. The irony of this transaction both perplexed and amused her. According to Aboriginal law, land cannot be owned. The white man had dug himself a big hole by insisting that it could. The only way out of it was to charge the next best thing to nothing for it. To Kath this was an admission that they had no legitimate claim on that land. The meaningless formality seemed to be the only way in which the white man could resolve the problem he had created for himself by his misinterpretation of the laws of nature. She once told me that we made everything harder than it needed to be and dealing with it all took far too much time away from the things that were really important. You search throughout your life for your sitting down place and when you find it, you sit down. Djang.

Half bush, half scrub, all humming, all hissing. On the land were two old but serviceable caravans. There was petrol generated electricity and a large rainwater tank but no sewerage. A group of architecture students had constructed a bush toilet and shower and were working on a wind generator and solar panels. For many years, Kath had welcomed school children and university students or anyone who wanted to learn about the Aboriginal ways.

A series of hand signals from her defined the anchoring point and it was simply a matter of conveying the four of us and our scant supplies to the shore in the dinghy under her precise direction. She was a true woman of the sea. The tide was low as we hauled ourselves through the oyster beds, cutting the sides of our feet which were left unprotected by the flimsy rubber thongs we were wearing.

Students of poetry from the University of Queensland were expected that night for a campside discussion. They were not staying at Moongalba but had booked into Clayton's cabins on the surfside. I was dispatched in the rusty, formally two-tone EK holden with the wide silver sun visor to the pub to buy casks of Coolabah riesling and plastic cups. We were all drunk when the students arrived but they did not seem to notice or were too polite to say. Kath slipped into her literary personality, rebuffing the effects of the alcohol with frightening deftness. Booze white fella poison, black fella poison, everybody poison she used to say.

In a pre-dawn state of post Coolabah nausea, we were dragged back across the mudflats and into the dinghy. Cans of Guinness were passed around to shock our listless bodies into action. Hand-held creels, buckets, boxes of tackle and crab pots were loaded onto the dinghy. Me not so hearties rowed across the crystalline waters to the Sea Nymph. Kath renamed her Quandamooka, the name the Nunukal called Moreton Bay. Quandamooka, queen of the silver seas.

First we laid down the crab pots and then we headed out to where Kath knew the bream would be. She was a fishing genius and had an instinctive sense of where a shoal were hanging out. Fishing, reading. Reading, fishing. The day passed. We lay around the gunnels tossing our lines in at will. Kath fished from the bow almost constantly with deep intent, like a mystic, ever so still. This was the thread that bound her inextricably. We were not in the same place. Lazy buggers she called us. I would know one day that this was not laziness but something much more difficult to cure.

The crab pot I had laid was heavy with quarry, so heavy I could barely lift it. I prayed it was not a female which I would have to throw back. As I dragged it to the surface I could see it contained not the magnificent male crab with succulent claws that I had anticipated but a very small and ugly shark. I did not care to know its gender. Eek was the only utterance that would emerge from my stupid mouth. The first piece of good news was that it was most assuredly dead. This is the only kind of shark with which to share a confined space. Even better news was that Kath was delighted. With expert hands she released the baby shark from the crab pot and tossed it into a bucket. Baby shark make good tucker.

While the rest of us dug the cooking pit, Kath cleaned the fish and cut up the shark which she then pickled in chopped onion and lemon juice. As twilight began to gleam, she gave me a bucket, a pair of Wellington boots and a strong, short, flat knife. I followed her out across the mud to the oysters and we each filled a bucket. She told me stories of the Nunukal dreaming. The dugong, she said, was special and Aboriginal people were not allowed to eat the dugong unless there was nothing else to eat. She also told me that the white fella greed would one day destroy the world.

I visited Minjerribah several times over the next two years and then I moved away from Queensland. I did not see the woman I knew as Kath again. I did hear though, from a friend who knew her well that when she died, a pair of whales appeared as her funeral began and swam off again as soon as the ceremony was over.

Sydney, 1980

It is all to do with the time lines. Later. I'll say just one thing about time lines for the moment because we're all going to get plenty of opportunity to chew over that one. It isn't who you're born, it's when you're born that determines success or failure in life. It's a dodgy fucking corridor. Ha. That's your lot for a bit.

This place on the time line is an important one, actually. While living in a Surrey Street squat something of a defining event occurred and of course, useless being that I am, I never recognised it as such. The Gladstone Hotel, I think it was called the Gladstone. It might have been the Goulbourn or the Melbourne. Anyway it was one of those Victorian prime minister type names. For argument's sake I'll call it the Gladstone. Gladstone will do well enough. So, this hotel, pub really, it's just that in Australia that's what we call pubs, hotels. This pub, The Gladstone or whatever, was also a squat. It was a pub squat. The squatters had set up home in the living area upstairs and the bar area they'd turned into a theatre. They sold drinks from the bar but none of the old pumps worked. Instead they just sold cans of beer and plastic cups of sour wine which they swilled from soggy five litre boxes. It was pretty ingenious really how they got that place together. A theatre has to have a lot of lights and they just tapped themselves into the mains with this massive long cable going out into the street which you had to walk over several times.

So, this defining moment, or so I think of it, happened on this one night at the Gladstone Hotel or whatever it was called. There was a musical on called One Way. I'm sure of the name of the musical, although not sure of the name of the hotel, so it must have been important. Now this wasn't some show about cowboys and hula girls snogging at clambakes. One Way was a show about squatters, people like us, living in houses, good houses that had been bought up by those smarmy cunts in suits from the Department of Main Roads so they could be crushed and replaced by a conveyor belt bringing even more suits into this poor over-suited city. I know I'm giving the impression here that I don't like these suity types and that might be a gross and sweeping generalisation and might not be fair to the one or two who are OK people and good fathers. Fuck it. I don't care about them. Do any of them care about me? I don't think so.

This show, One Way, was about the squatters fighting the DMR because the motorway that they had bought the houses to knock down and build had been redirected, so more houses could be bought and knocked down. So the squatters were fighting the DMR to let them stay in the houses that were not going to be knocked down because the DMR had bought other houses to knock down. But even though the DMR could never have got their shit together enough to get these perfectly good houses rented out to someone other than these awful suited types, who wouldn't have wanted them anyway, they tried to get the squatters out by force. This was a really scarey show in that it was quite violent but it was an attractive kind of violence if you know what I mean, because it was valiant. It had a terrifying bit at the end of the first act where these police dogs nearly tore a squatter to bits. There was blood everywhere. Not real blood, stage blood, but still. Christ those bloody dogs were good. He died at the end, this poor bloke after languishing through the whole second act in a coma. It was achingly sad and I didn't understand until years later that this is how musicals work. Something hideous happens at the end of the first act and the person you want most not to die, dies.

The lesson that I did not learn here, and this is important, is that when these little epiphanies happen you should take notice of them and not bury them somewhere very deep in the subconscious so they can come out many years later, probably during a period of intense madness where they might just get thrown out with the rest of the refuse of a mind undergoing demolition.

*

Noosa, December 1998

I always think better when I'm sitting on a wave. Am I alone? I enquire of the undulating sea. Am I me? Whodatdere? I lie on my body board with my limp arms and legs dangling in the warm, lapping sea, my sun-soaked face half in and half out of the water. Every woman is an island I whisper to the sea. That island lies off the coast of society. Had this always been the case? Memories are like dots to be joined. My dots never form a coherent picture. Now animals etch themselves into the world. They require no justification. They can just be.

Kindly Noosa means no one any harm. In this place I am not hunted. I am not betrayed, well mostly. I know this because I have come to Noosa most Christmases for about thirty years, even though I've lived in Hackney Wick in London since 1982. My mother lives here now and so do my sister Penny, Penny's husband Kevin and their daughter Ariel, aged one and a bit. Mum's been renamed Nanoo by Ariel. I want to drift I tell the sea. If I fall asleep, will you carry me away?

What does it take to know the world? I query the wave I choose to ride in on. Having picked out this wave, I kick with my one flipper, dolphin style until I am sure that the wave has picked up the board. The Noosa waves are long and low and always take you right into the shore. They are easy to catch and easy to keep, unlike men. Tee hee, so long sea. I kick off the flipper and drag myself and the board out of the water. I am momentarily overcome by a feeling of lightheadedness. Flopping down in the sand, I lie for a while in the fading sun.

*

To be thoroughly Noosified is a great thing. You know the world is big because you can see just how big it is, from Nanoo's house, all day, every day. To the east the world's greatest ocean, the Pacific squeezes its mighty self between Noosa Heads and sweeps its way west, where it stretches into great lakes. Behind them, bold stone mountains grab at the bright sky. Koalas blink from high eucalypts. Snakes lay coiled in underwear drawers. Kookaburras gargle. Cicadas click. Elephant beetles crash land in backyard swimming pools. The redback hunches under the toilet seat and waits. Waits.

Serenity seems so weird. Nanoo floats about her great white house, apparently without even moving air. She has found her sitting down place. London, on the other hand, is a place where every step you take seems to displace the universe. As I lay on the great white sofa, reading a Tim Winton novel, I am aware of harmony but also that I approach it with the speed of an inchworm.

"I was just thinking", Nanoo says, "you always seem so happy when you're in Noosa. Why don't you come back and live here?"

"And do what exactly? I'm in the regeneration business. Noosa is only thirty years old. It's not going to need regenerating for about another hundred years."

"You could get a job in the council."

"As what, a clerical officer?"

"Well, I just think, the lifestyle here is so good, it doesn't really matter what job you have. Anyway, you don't seem to like your job that much."

"Nothing wrong with the job. It's the people that fuck it up."

"Everyone in London always seems so angry to me."

"Seething."

Slam, slam, slam. The sound of three car doors closing in quick succession signals the arrival of my sibling.

"There's Penny now", Nanoo says with marked relief in her voice.

"Hiiiii", we both sing as my younger sister ascends the stairs with her husband Kevin behind her, carrying Ariel.

In our family, there are few children and even fewer men. My Dad, Dave Hardy died on Christmas Eve the year before I left for England. Kevin is the only man in the family for nearly twenty years.

"Ariel", I try to coax over my niece. She momentarily looks up in response but is not moved to venture toward the aunt she does not know, "what do you want to be when you grow up then Ariel?", I enquire of the one and a bit year old.

"What are you talking about?", queries Penny. Three generations of Hardys wander into the kitchen to do what generations of women do in kitchens. Ariel will go for the saucepan cupboard no doubt. Bang. Yep. Saucepan cupboard it is. The fridge opening and closing means that Penny is depositing various pots of juice and yoghurt and something made with vegetable protein which will look really horrible now but taste magnificent in a couple of hours time. I briefly wonder what it must be like to have the ability to transform food. Nanoo is in the kitchen because it's her kitchen. Bang. Crash. Ariel has found two saucepan lids and is composing Carnival of the Animals which, as we know, is all part of growing up. Gurgle, gurgle.

"Watchadoin?", Kevin asks me. I'm not being funny but that is the way he talks. If you try and picture what a cosine wave would sound like if it actually sounded the way it looks, then that's the way Kevin talks. I have to say here that Nanoo does not like Kevin. I'm sort of neutral. I've never spent that much time with him. If I had to, I'd come down on the side of OK, if only for balance.

"Mediary", I respond. Yep. I'm a diary keeper. There's a few shocks in there for a few people if I go before they do, believe me. I can't bottle stuff up but I don't want to get into any fights so I just toss all the junk into these sturdy, hard-cover notebooks. Cheaper than therapy and better for you. Besides, have you ever seen anybody try to resolve a conflict? What a con that is. There's no winners except the fucking therapists (pal). So I keep the diary. Mine is a life recorded if not exactly ordered.

Penny brings out a tray of drinks and those fabulous Japanese rice snacks that I absolutely love but never think to buy and I don't believe what I'm hearing. Nanoo is saying she doesn't think we should put the Christmas tree up this year. Fuckingfannyshit.

"But we have to have the Christmas tree", I whine, because that's what you do when your mother issues an unpopular decree. I'm this far away from moaning, aww that's not fair.

"Well I'm a bit worried about Ariel pulling it down."

"Did we ever pull down the Christmas tree?" This is the wrong thing for Penny to say because it just reminds us of what a destructive child she actually was, uprooting plants and Nanoo had to inspect the skirting boards every single day to make sure there was not a lifting corner because Penny would have a whole sheet of wallpaper off in seconds if she could get her fingers locked onto a lifting corner. There is a long pause while we all try to remember if Penny had ever pulled down the Christmas tree and I don't think she ever did. Nanoo capitulates.

"Weeelll, no."

"There you are then. I want to do the tree. I love doing the tree. Besides there is only one of her and there are four of us. We can simply physically prevent her from pulling it down."

"All right then."

*

Christmas Eve

Penny and I climb into the Holden station wagon with Ariel in the back and drive down to Hastings Street. It is nearing sunset. Hastings Street, the main and, for all intents and purposes, only street at Noosa Beach, is jammed with holiday jeeps.

"I always think of Dad on Christmas Eve", I tell Penny, "and wonder what he would have made of Noosa now."

"I tell you what", Penny says as she extracts Ariel from her little seat, "he would have loved one of those big four-wheel drives. Can't you just see him barrelling along the North Beach with his fishing rods lashed to a burnt orange Nissan Patrol?"

Yeah, I could see that. Dave Hardy loved fishing. The first thing we used to do when we arrived at Noosa was to go down the beach with a bucket and collect pippies. Dave usually fished at Sunshine Beach. The pippies in the bucket sat in the laundry burrowed in the sand, on borrowed time. Come sundown they would be taken out and hung on a hook and tossed into the sea when the whiting were biting. Dave sometimes fished for tailor. This large, aggressive fish had scissor-like teeth and required a series of big hooks joined together and a garfish for bait. If he heard that the tailor were running he'd be out all night and come in exhausted in the morning, his hands cut up from battling the fish and his feet whipped with the red gashes that indicated the night waters had been full of blue bottles. You see pain does not matter to a man.

"Drink?" I venture as we reach the extremities of the little walkway which stretches out along Noosa Main Beach.

"Yeah, OK."

When Dave died it had been at about the same time, sunset on Christmas Eve. It was instant, they said. A massive heart attack brought on by a burst aortic aneurysm. We became a family of women because of it and somehow, the balance in my life was lost that day and nothing had been able to retrieve it.

*

"She does this every year." Penny is exasperated not to mention exhausted from trying to keep Ariel away from the Christmas tree all morning. A mountain of perfectly wrapped Christmas presents is parked deliciously under the tree. I can't imagine where Nanoo could have put the presents if we had not put up the tree. What Nanoo does every year is delay the present opening. It is already 11.30 and Nanoo is still out watering the garden.

"Don't let her see you crack." I go on patiently reading my Tim Winton novel.

"It's all right for you, you haven't had to stand between a small child and large coloured boxes for the best part of a day." Penny's comments trail off as a cheerful and triumphant Nanoo re-enters Christmas.

"Finished", she chirps as she emerges from the tropical jungle she likes to call a garden, "I'll just have a quick shower and then we can open the presents", she adds cheerfully.

"Ooooo, Nanoo", gurgles Ariel as she watches her sweat-drenched grandmother disappear into the bathroom.

"Another hour", squeals Penny.

"I think I'll open that champagne, anyone else want a drink?"

"Yeah, I'll have a glass." Kevin is trying to make sense of the Hardy neurosis.

"All right. Anything to pass the time", acquiesces Penny.

"Na Na Na Na", burbles Ariel.

"Que?", I enquire of the child who is clapping her hands together blissfully unaware of the filial dynamics.

"Banana", clarifies Penny, "I'll get it, she'll only have a half a one. Nanoo won't be able to do this next year. Ariel will be old enough to understand and we'll be up opening presents at six o'clock, like a normal family."

We're on the second bottle of champagne when Nanoo finally emerges from the bathroom and most of the pretzels and macademia nuts have disappeared from the table.

"Present time", she enthuses, "I'll have my champagne now please." I pour her a full glass even though I know she'll only drink half of it.

"Cheers. Merry Christmas", we all hum in unison.

"It is about control", Penny whispers as she hands me my first present.

You know what? I don't think it is. I think Nanoo is worried about whether we'll like our presents. A lot of people are confused about the value of things and you can hardly blame them. Money is valued above human life in a lot of places. You might think that this is the way it's always been and you might be right. Perhaps it's just the hypocrisy that gets to me. I fucking hate hypocrisy.

*

On the beach I see Ariel, playing with her new bucket and spade, wearing her new pink togs. She has a pink floppy hat to go with them and her nose is smeared in pink zinc. How is it that children instinctively know exactly what to do with a bucket and spade? I have lost my instincts I inform the passing wave. No, no, you have simply forgotten how to use them the wave replies as it rolls gracefully into shore. I wish I was a wave. Penny is wearing the black and white Marks and Spencer's togs I got her and she looks elegant and serenely at peace with her life. I wonder if I will know such a peace and whether or not it is child related, either ipso or facto. Nanoo is tucked up under the big umbrella reading Henry James. Nanoo loves a good book and it's one of the few times you'll ever see her really relax, when she's reading a book.

Funny, I tell the sea, when you're a kid you think your parents are stupid and that you'll do much better than they ever did because you are so much smarter. Kids know jackshit replies the sea. Where do you get off using expressions like jackshit, I reprimand, where you from, wise guy, California? In retaliation the cruel sea suddenly throws up a tremendous wave. I am unfortunately positioned directly underneath it and have no choice but to ride. It is, naturally, a dumper. In seconds I am ploughing into the thick sand. The board disappears from under me, traitorous coward that it is and spins out behind me. As it reaches the extent of my leg strap, it pings straight back and clunks down on my head. I stumble from the water, bikini top wrapped around my neck like a tie in a fist fight. As a final insult the contemptuous sea spits out the flipper which has been ripped off in the turmoil. I fall back into the sea to realign the bikini top as the errant board bobs back and forth, still attached to my leg. Kevin rushes to retrieve the flipper which is Auckland bound.

"Looks like ya picked a dumper", he remarks helpfully.

I never could spot a dumper, in or out of the water.

*

Black Crow Dreaming

Bellin Bellin the crow conned the Koori people. He told the snakes to hide in an ant mound and when the Koori women came by he told them to go to the ant mound where they would find lots of larvae which he said was a delicacy. When the women went to the ant mound the snakes attacked them and, in the ensuing confusion, Bellin Bellin stole the coals out of their fire. While he was busy cooking a possum up in his tree, the Kooris snuck up on him and demanded the coals back. In the tussle the red hot coals fell out of the tree and started a bushfire, which charred his feathers black.

In the carpark behind Noosa Beach I see a crow pestering an injured possum. The possum has smartly positioned herself on a branch that will just about hold her own weight so every time the crow tries to land on the branch it bows untenably and he is forced to retreat. The possum can only hope that the crow does not think to trick the coals away from the barbeques nearby. Then she really would be in the shit. Djang.

*

The big British Airways jet roars out of Brisbane over the great Pacific Ocean taking me home to London. I say home, out of habit really. I don't know what else to call it. Always flight delivers messages. You can't straddle stools forever the sea yells after me. In my cloud-bound dream, I am crouching on the sand and I slowly fill a bucket. When it is full I pack down the sand contents tight and carefully upend the castle inside which I decorate with shells. I note that the tide is receeding. Suddenly a rogue wave leaps forward and washes my castle away.

Chapter Two

Hell is other people.

John Paul Sartre

Hackney Wick, January 1999

I'm glad I live on a canal, even if it is in Hackney Wick. It is a crisp and beautiful morning. Outside the mist is draped around the naked branches of winter trees. Seagulls are skating on the canal's thin coat of ice. The last time I saw seagulls, fuckingfannyshit, seagulls just don't look right schlepping about on ice. There is a terrible ungrace to that. I compare them to their Noosa cousins. Those are accidental seagulls out there, disasterously off course, unsure ground beneath their unsure feet. I make coffee which sends up a companion mist to wind itself around me. Another kind of nakedness. More a bereftness really.

It's a basic rule of thumb that whenever I go away for five or six weeks, wild shit happens. I always come back to a couple of domestic disasters and a broken romance. Later. There's a letter from my bastard housing association threatening me with eviction. This is mandatory if you're five minutes late with your rent. I check my records and discover that I paid two lots in one before I went away. So, far from being five minutes late, I am in fact, thirty days, twenty-three hours and fifty-five minutes early. I briefly pause to be amazed by my efficiency and then put on my best pissed-off voice for the phone call.

"It's standard practice Mzzz Hardy", says the tenant liaison officer. That really gets on my tit being called Mzzz. Why do people invent unpronouncable words that don't mean anything? Take my advice. Stick to words with Latin and Greek roots. You can't go wrong, "If a sum of money is not received by the due date, the computer automatically sends out a reminder."

"This is not a reminder, this is a threat."

"Mzzz Hardy", grrr, "I've told you it's a standard letter and since you are not in arrears, you may ignore the letter. Now, is there anything else I can do for you?"

"Yes you can apologise for scaring the shit out of me."

"Mzzz Hardy", grrr, "I don't find your attitude helpful. As tenant liaison officer it is part of my role to ensure that all tenants are aware of their responsibilities to the landlord."

"Why don't you just apologise for being wrong and we'll call it quits."

"Good-bye Mzzz Hardy."

*

I finally sort through my post and what do I find? None other than a letter from my fuckwit management committee. It reads:

Dear Heather

I hoop you had a very god holiday. On a serious note, the Director's wood bequest that we mate with for you to answer development's when you have been on annual leaf. This meeting is at the Community Centre on Wednesday 13 January, 1999 at 12.30pm. Therefore you are requested not to retain to the office until the meeting with the Director's. I also kingly asp you that you not to discus any mother on behalf of the organisation and that the meeting will be strictly primate and confidential.

Signed Brian Dribbles (chair) & Clarence Wantabe (vice-chair)

I believe in the boding of things, always have. Not that it's done me the vaguest bit of good mind. I get postboding more than foreboding which is not much use unless you want to analyse everything after the fact which I probably should do more of but can't be arsed. So this is how, in a nutshell, I always end up in these ludicrous situations which any sane person would know, or at least learn to avoid. Don't ask. What I'm working up to here is how I could possibly end up in the stew I am now in. How I ended up on the wrong side of the tracks on the wrong side of town on the wrong side of the world in a state of virtual siege. How does a person such as myself, a loner by nature, end up running a community development trust?

Too much of my life has been worryingly accidental. Hurricane Heather. I wish. I don't want to talk about this really but there's not much point in trying to pretend it's not happening. In my own defence, I really have to say that the fabric of society, here in 1999 is polyester. Truth is the real casualty of the twentieth century. It's because I am such a loner I got myself into so much trouble, although there's plenty of people in this parish would like to tell you different. Fuck them. Why should I have a balanced view? Let them write their own book.

There's a lot of levels I could look at if I could ever be fucked to do it. It started when I got back from Spain which was another mad situation which I don't want to go into now because it would just confuse things (I think). Probably if we did look at the broader picture, you'd be able to see a pattern there somewhere that I've been missing. But I digress. Spain is really the key to it all because I came back exhausted and demoralised after a failed business venture and a failed love venture both of which I thought were going fine until they weren't and I never saw it coming which is what always seems to happen.

I came back to my manky council flat which was at least home or used to be before Denise's dippy, hippy friend Nyall wrecked it. Have I mentioned Denise yet? Later. What do you suppose possesses people to pull half the wallpaper off a wall and just leave it, half on, half off? He threw out most of my stuff as well and broke what was left. I spent the first week back repairing the answerphone and stereo and replacing light bulbs and batteries. You would doubt that this Nyall could do anything worse than just exist but he did manage. He found the wettest, whiniest Canadian that ever drew breath and lodged him in the spare room. Lucky for me, the Canadian had only been around for about two weeks but in that time had managed to amass a phone bill into the triple figures. I chucked the Canadian against a wall and got the money for the phone and then I chucked them both out but they left me with some serious debts.

Picture the pathetic scene of a forty year-old woman, on the dole, in a manky council flat with less than half the requisite amount of wallpaper needed for civilised existence, surrounded by broken things and bills owing. Not pretty. So I went and got a job, a proper job, for the first time ever. No more drifting, no more dippy, hippy mates of Denise trashing what passes for a home on the wrong side of the tracks, on the wrong side of town on the wrong side of the world.

The one thing that remained unmolested was my piano. My fine little baby grand piano that probably would have ended up in a skip if it had been an upright. A baby grand makes a useful surface and there was evidence that it had performed that function. But there it was, sitting in a corner, still covered in the blanket I had thrown over it two years before. The blanket was stained with paint rings but there had been no penetration onto the precious mahogany beneath. A smart person would have read some significance into that. This was the daisy defying the concrete.

So I got this job so I could get my shared ownership flat by the canal. You own half and some bastard housing association owns the other half. Later. The job didn't start out as much. I was just an assistant to a bloke I dubbed Inaction Man. The guy was a suit so you know right away I shouldn't have been there. The job was in urban regeneration. Come again? The problem with urban regeneration is that the people who work in it think it's the greatest thing since the wheel but everyone else thinks it's a load of shit and I know who's right about that. At the time though I thought it sounded like something worthwhile. I couldn't work in the city, no way. Fucking on the photocopier at Christmas sounds like fun but would I be able to handle the other three-sixty-four? I don't think so. Bill Clinton wants a bullet badly if you ask me. Just so you know where I'm coming from here. But I digress.

Inaction Man left me to do everything which is how I learned all about the deprivation industry and how I then got a job running the Goodwell Trust which is on the Goodwell Estate, one of the most notorious council housing estates in Britain and a front runner for a mega multi-million pound refurbishment programme. You start to see how my luck runs? First off I'd like to say that there is no nicer little earner than the poverty pound, and before you start getting all shirty with me, that's not why I got into it. You've got to understand that I had no skills to speak of. I'd been picking up little bits of cash here and there working as an assistant on dud musicals and playing piano in bars and all sorts of other diversions, like Spain which I'll have to tell you about another time. The deprivation industry is a great vehicle for someone with no specific skills and a big mouth.

People are always asking me the question, "what is regeneration?", and I'm always having to give them some tilt-encrusted flannel rather than the truth, which I am pleased to share with you now. People in the deprivation industry are unbelievably precious and pious about how important the whole thing is which is why it attracts so many of these wafty, lofty types. It's also saturated with cash which is why it attracts bastard housing associations and suits in plague proportions. Regeneration is the price we pay for not giving a fuck about anything. Since the western world's collective conscience slipped into a coma around 1980, the not giving of a fuck has become the universal ethic. Eat no lean.

You'll tell me there's always been poverty and there's always been the holier than thou who thought it was their job to do something about it. And you'd be right. But the rules have changed. You used to be able to spot the poor because they were the hungry ones. Not a bit of it now. In the western world the fatter you are, the poorer you are. Poverty is no longer about lack of bread or even lack of opportunity. There is no shortage of opportunities. What there is is the complete refusal by the suits to allow honest people access to those opportunities. That's why, no matter how much there is, and how close it is, there'll always be people who can't get to any of it.

What we've really got to worry about is a poverty of knowledge. I'm not talking about information. There's plenty of that about. If you only ever entertain one philosophical concept in your life, let it be this one. Everything is connected. Information without context is about as much use as a chocolate fire engine. The realisation that everything is connected explains all the anomolies of the world, except Chris de Burgh. What is logic if not a series of concepts placed in the right order? Contextualised. Perfect. There's your Nirvana (pal).

The deprivation industry is based on a series of concepts which do not follow and holds within it the seed of its own destruction. Any sane person could tell you that the objectives of regeneration should be to (a) fix up all the falling down buildings and give them to people to live and work in (b) find things for people to do now that there is no coal to dig, no ships to build and no fabric to weave (c) educate children so that they don't come out of school stupider than when they went in.

I have a theory that babies are born with a complete knowledge of the workings of the universe. Babies get the meaning of life which is why they're always smiling and punching the air. When they cry it's because they've forgotten something really important which they know they will never get back. By the time they reach five they've forgotten they even knew that they knew everything there was to know. All kids start school in a state of cerebral meltdown and then learn very little in the wrong order which is why they get so frustrated.

There is an entirely erroneous belief that oxygen is good for the brain. It seems to me that as soon as humans become exposed to oxygen, the brain starts to deteriorate. Oxygen is bad for you, as is light. This is why writers, musicians and people who actually understand computers spend all their time in dark, smoke-filled rooms. They say that if you're drowning your whole life flashes before your eyes. People who've nearly drowned say they were overwhelmed by a sudden and profound contentment. They saw their life in context and it made perfect sense for once. Oxygen deprivation can be the only explanation. Think about it. I digress.

Of course if we in the deprivation industry did all the obvious things that stand out like a hammered thumb, we'd be out of a job, tout á fait. Problem. The deprivation industry is one of the biggest growth sectors in the country. If you think about it, you get the most money if you are the most deprived but if you make actual improvements and become less deprived then some other area will get the money instead of yours and you'll be staring at a pink slip and wondering whatthefuck. That can't be allowed to happen. You hear the word sustainability a lot but the only thing the deprivation industry is bent on sustaining is itself. There's only one way to spend these huge amounts of money and please the bean counters without making a single calculable difference. What you do is you find as many unemployed people as possible and send them on courses in lifeskills. This usually covers stuff they should have learned at three like how not to be a total cunt except when absolutely necessary.

All that aside, it would be an OK job satisfaction wise if it weren't for the fact that about once a week you have to sit in a room for three hours with twenty or so suits brainstorming on issues. If you're in the deprivation industry or thinking of getting into it, photocopy this page because it could save you a lot of time. Don't worry about breach of copyright or any of that shit. It would be my pleasure, really.

Whatever urban setting you're in, the suits and the issues will always be the same. You'll be sitting there with a facilitator. This will be a woman in a Chanel copy jacket with a neat brown bob and clean black court shoes with a red marker pen in her hand and a blank flip chart to her immediate left, unless of course she is left-handed in which case the flip chart will be on her right. The police inspector will be the first to speak. "Crime and fear of crime" will be the first issue to go up on the flip chart. The bastard housing association man will say "safe, affordable homes", the social worker will say "challenging anti-social behaviour", the educationalist will say "basic skills", the businessman will say "employability" and then someone will notice that no one has mentioned equal opportunities. Gasp. So you all decide that equal opportunities should underpin everything you do. Marvellous.

In all likelihood, you will find yourself spending six months in a working sub-group, beavering away on a mission statement. Mission statements always come out the same so save yourself the bother and use this pro-forma.

To make (insert the name of your neighbourhood here) a good/a better/the best* place in which to live, work, learn and play, for everyone.

* Delete as appropriate using the following financial formula. If you have:

Under £25 million - good

£25-50 million - better

Over £50 million - best

You will invariably find yourself at five minute intervals as these suits are grappling with issues and mission statements, wondering "can they all really be this stupid?" You have stumbled upon one of the great phenomena of the deprivation industry - the really stupid smart people. They specialise in bogging the process up to the wheelbase. Without them, the industry would have a died a death maybe fifteen years ago, because we would have realised that all the tough concepts they're finding so boggling, like how do we provide an adequate waste disposal service, the Romans knew how to do and all we have to do is find out how the Romans did it and copy that.

If ever a group of suits looks like making a decision, someone will chuck in a classic spanner like "look, I'm not clear on what it is we actually mean by community." Spare yourself the mental thumbscrews and don't buy into this. Put your job at risk if necessary. It's the best thing you'll ever do. Simply say "a noun meaning the people living in one locality. Let's move on." The suits will immediately try to decontextualise the word so that it means something that includes them. They'll accuse you of taking a simplistic view and insist a broader definition (that includes them), must be applied.

Getting over this hurdle is easier than it looks. All you need to do is recontextualise immediately. Simply say, "if the deprived were not all living in the one place, how would we know where to find them? Now, really, let's move on." Rocket science it ain't.

Now the suits know that they have to get some local people involved so the obvious thing to do is pick the dumbest people possible and immediately start telling them how important they are. This effectively separates them from anyone who could feasibly batter some sense into them when they develop Napoleonic tendencies. The next step is to set them the impossible task of setting up a community development trust. Give them a great deal of money so they can mismanage and/or embezzle it over a long period of time. This needs to include a big salaries budget so they can hire a couple of highly paid workers that they can immediately start to resent and mistreat. Finally, they will need a large derelict building to transform into a community centre. For this they will need a team of impossibly impractical architects who will ensure that the project takes three times as long and costs twice as much as is necessary. For the final flourish, bury them in government guidance and project proposals. In a few short years it's possible to turn simple urban folk with nothing but a few paltry good intentions into card-carrying members of the cuntocracy, made extra mean by the illusion of success. I have to say all this now because there is no understanding any of the shit that's flying around without it.

And so to my fuckwit management committee. Firstly, Brian Dribbles and his wife fat Fiona. I feel sorry for Dribbles in a way. He's got three of the most miserable, whiney kids you'll ever meet who've all got faces like a thousand wet, muddy Saturdays and they're all fat and greasy looking because fat Fiona feeds them chips and sweets from dawn to dusk and the only exercise their blobby little bodies get is when their teeth can be arsed to decay. Fat Fiona is a proper little tea leaf. Toilet paper, art supplies, stationery, toys that come in at Christmas. She gets up raffles and pockets most of the money and don't get me started on the petty cash tin. She seems so thick you wonder how she could think she could ever get away with it. But you can never catch her out. You can know with absolute certainty that she's nicked something but she'll just stand there and say, "I ain't done nuffink" over and over again until you start to believe you're on a cross channel ferry in a force ten gale and you just have to walk away.

Just as there are really stupid smart people, there are really smart stupid people. Dribbles is a shining example of the smart stupid person. He left school at fifteen and went to work in the paint factory adjacent to the estate. It closed down nearly twenty years ago and he hasn't worked since. Putting the lids on paint tins appears not to have been one of the transferable skills everyone seems to believe you need in order to stay in work these days. Dribbles is obsessed with qualifications since he left school with none. The walls of the Goodwell Trust are papered with certificates in his name describing themselves as CLAITs. If anyone knows what they are, please e-me because whenever CLAITs are mentioned in a meeting, half the people in the room put their heads down and the other half nod knowingly.

It's thought locally that people who worked in the paint factory have been chemically affected and that explains a few things about quite a few people. Dribbles has always been a bit of a loose canon. He can, on occasion make a peculiar form of sense, within a very narrow context. Dribbles is a sponge when it comes to collecting information but he has no capacity for analysis. He is, however, capable of regurgitating great slabs of regeneration flannel which occasionally matches the flannel of his correspondent. He is also, for the most part, tame, naive and maleable, which makes him the perfect pet resident. This is a guy who could fall and not even realise he'd been pushed. Yet, for several years, Dribbles has been in charge of this organisation, without restraint, censor or account.

It is my view that Clarence Wantabe is clinically insane. This isn't going to make me very popular in the deprivation industry, which I am thinking of getting out of by the way. It's very difficult to get people to sit on the management committees of community development trusts and mad people not only have a lot of time, they have no concept of time as something that can be measured, much less valued. Occasionally normal people do show up at our meetings but they usually leave after about twenty minutes saying "this is a waste of time." You can tell immediately that these are normal people because they are aware that time has not only passed but has passed fruitlessly, even ludicrously. Clarence once squandered a whole meeting demanding to know why one of the outreach workers had been sacked when he hadn't. The guy had left because he'd been offered a better job. We wished him well, had a pint at the Old Ship, Marks and Spencer's vouchers and a nice card, which Clarence signed. But Clarence wouldn't have it that the guy had left of his own free will and volition.

What makes mad people on management committees so dangerous is that mad people reach boiling point instantaneously. You can be having a perfectly reasonable, even business-like discussion one minute and suddenly find yourself being accused of having a hidden agenda. Now nobody really knows what this means, but it is guaranteed to explode any situation. Someone accuses someone else of having a hidden agenda and the sky falls in. On the subject of agendas (or should that be agendii? - since I'm always going on about the importance of Greek and Latin roots, I will make it my business to find out), you can guarantee that whatever you put on it will be the one thing that never gets discussed. Don't put anything really important on the agenda. Save it for any other business. That way, anyone who's left at the table when it finally comes up, will be too fagged to give a fuck.

The last meeting before I went on holiday descended into a complete bloodbath as Dribbles and Fat Fiona shouted at their next door neighbour whom they insisted was a paedophile. The situation was further complicated when another set of battling neighbours started up at the other end of the room. The woman was pregnant. The bloke was pissed. He headbutted her. Two sets of police had to be called. I spent the next three hours being shunted between interview rooms in Hackney Police Station.

So you'd think with Dribbles in the chair and Clarence as vice-chair, it would be enough ill- fortune for any organisation and you'd be absolutely right, but it gets worse. There's Howard. Talk about someone left the cake out in the rain. Howard once interrupted a meeting I was having with the lady from the National Lottery to bring me a drink, hot Ribena as it goes. He was wearing green wellies, a tartan skirt and a pink twinset with green pearlised beads and a gold Alice band. He asked the lady from the National Lottery if she would like a hot Ribena. She declined graciously and we received no money from the National Lottery.

As well as the empowered insane, the basic constituency of a fuckwit management committee is a couple of snidey know nothing/do nothing officers from the council's community empowerment unit and a couple of scumbag know nothing/do nothing local councillors. You're stuck with these and can't do anything about it except vote next time there's a local election, you lazy tosser, and one day things might change. You can't move in this business without tripping over an ambitious vicar who believes that tending the poor is the role of the church, especially if there's cash on offer. All sorts of religious groups are attaching their tentacles to the poverty pound these days. All they have to do is pretend they're not dispensing religion. The password is advice. You can get lots of money for giving advice to people whom other people think need it. Although what kind of financial advice you could give someone who is surviving on the dole is beyond me. Shouldn't these people be giving us advice? Then there's your bastard housing association, the Monsanto of the deprivation world. They're always sniffing around these days as Hackney Council is very fond of giving away housing estates and big wads of cash to bastard housing associations.

In our case there's also a little bald businessman in silk sox and a camel hair coat. He's hanging in there because of the derelict paint factory next to the estate which the council owns and may suddenly feel generous about, given the right incentive. On to the youth workers Marcus and Pedro. These guys are like two rear ends of a pantomime horse. No wonder the kids are so fucking miserable. Leadership courses, issue-based arts and the ubiquitous anti-drugs campaigns. Fuckingfannyshit. And we're not talking about little kids. Sixteen to twenty-five, that's what we're talking about. There was a time when we used to call these people adults. Adolescence is about surviving. It wouldn't be at all worth bothering with if it wasn't some mad baptism of fire, now would it? There is no substitute for sex, drugs and r'n'b. You might as well take as many drugs as you can while your brain cells are still replenishing. You're cool until about thirty. Call me old-fashioned, but it was a fundamental tenet, probably the number one tenet of my youth, that from around the age of twelve, you take no advice from any adult on any subject, ever. What is the matter with everybody now?

This is my personal view and you can disagree with it if you like (write your own fucking book). Kids need accomplishments. Everyone needs accomplishments. Like learning to play the piano for example. Anything, in fact with a system that provides you with something you can keep improving on for the rest of your life. Believe me, you'll regret it if you don't get a few accomplishments and your kids will resent you forever if you don't force them to get a few. Better they hate you when they're young and they can't do anything about it than later in life when you might need them to run your errands and listen to you when no one else has got the patience. Just a thought.

Learn the method, not the madness. That's my motto. Art is not life. Art is metaphor. Life is life. And madness is a very personal thing. Djang.

*

I go to the meeting which I am not supposed to discuss with anyone. Dribbles is there and Clarence and Howard. It's a dirty business so the vicar, the snidey council officers, scumbag councillors and Silk Sox have decided to leave them to it. They give me a letter and it says I'm being sacked for gross misconduct.

"What gross misconduct?"

This is what they have done. Despite the fact that there are three computers in the office that none of them have a gnat's notion of how to use, they decided that they wanted to buy a new computer. They further decided that they would like to spend three times as much for this computer as anyone else would. How could this be achieved given the fierce price war that exists between computer manufacturers? You'd reckon it would be nigh on impossible to get ripped off these days if purchasing a computer through legitimate means. And you would no doubt be right. So what they decided to do was get this computer from a friend of Howard's. The next problem was money. There was only just enough money in the bank to cover running costs, including my salary. They could worry about that later, obviously. The immediate problem was how to get to the money since they needed my signature. This problem was easier to solve than you might imagine. This is because of the perverse nature of the British banking system.

Banking thinking seems to be stuck in the 17th century when the only customers for banking were the aristocracy whom we know were as mad as meathooks. It seems if you are a sane, reasonable person who wants nothing more than to access your own money, every wall in China is placed in your path. If however, you are one or more patently mad people with the obvious intent of defrauding a registered charity, your average high street bank can't do enough to assist. Dribbles, in his position as chair, simple phoned the bank and informed the manager that a decision had been made that the account only needed one signatory, himself.

Having signed the cheque that redirectored my salary, Dribbles then went into a panic about how I might react. This was an uncharacteristic piece of sane thinking. Then it occurred to him that if they sacked me, it would solve all their problems. It doesn't take long to drag this out of them since they are neither brave nor bright. I make them get the money for the computer back from Howard's friend and shame them all into resigning which means I still have a job but I'm short a chair and a vice-chair, leaving the organisation inquorate, unoperational, vulnerable and fucked, probably.

Crocodile Dreaming

The great crocodile of North Queensland lies as still as death in the water and waits. He is completely submerged except for his sharp cruising eyes. You never see him coming. Snap.

Chapter Three

People are always talking about the public interest,

but all they really care about is private property

Thomas More, Utopia

Things have assumed the shape of the pear. I go to work in a state of siege. The cuntocracy begin to close in. Bad, sad things keep happening. I forget that I'm back in Hackney where you're supposed to treat kids as if they were the Waffen SS, actually they are the Waffen SS or descendents of the Waffen SS. And what I mean by this is that when you walk down the street and a group of kids are walking four abreast, you are not supposed to register any disapproval, you just get out of their way. Mustn't criticise anything kids do, even up to and including pushing old ladies out of the way while they're trying to get on the bus. Don't get me started on kids not giving up seats for elderly people. Fuckingfannyshit, I can't bear that. But I digress. So, the Waffen SS are marching down Mare Street, self-consciously pretending not to notice me coming the other way which I know they do because I can feel the little cunts conspiring. They're all about ten by the way or eleven and they're speaking that language that kids speak when they're trying to frighten people, which incredibly, works very well. Orrreyefuckinorwhatemsayinmaaaan, self-consciously loud and I know the one on the end who is very self-consciously looking the other way is going to bump right into me and he does. Now, this is crucial. I must have a kind of fuckit death wish about me because not only do I register actual disapproval, I push the little cunt away as he slams into me and utter the highly inflammatory "watch yourself", which earns me a string of invective predictably enough.

Now here is where I am really stupid, well not that stupid actually, because I don't stand and fight, which I wish I had but that's not really worth going into. It just would have been quite a spectacle, the sight of a forty-four year-old woman battering off an offensive from a ten year-old Waffen SS. I just turn around and walk off but don't keep looking behind me which is what you absolutely must do if you get into any kind of tussle with any Waffen SS of any age. So, I'm a few minutes down the road and suddenly I feel this great shove in the back and I'm sprawled out, in the middle of Mare Street and these two little cunts scream, "fucking bitch" at me and run off. And in all of Mare Street which is crammed with people, no one helps me up, or yells at these kids or registers any evaluation of the situation. There is zero response. I guess people figure that if a couple of ten year-olds chase after a forty-four year old woman in the street, shove her to the ground and call her a fucking bitch, they must have a good reason.

Of course, you can look at the funny side, which is that when I was a kid (I won't go on about this too much), I was frightened of adults because they were bigger and stronger than me but now that's all finished because adults can't thump kids, even when they are behaving like complete cunts, whereas kids can batter adults to their evil little hearts' content and not get into any trouble for it which makes it so worth doing. People are always saying that you should never use violence (now there's a misunderstood word) on your children. So what happens when your uncontained brat goes out into the world as an adult and gives some quick-tempered geezer the sort of shit you've been sitting on your hands over for years and gets a bottle in the face for his trouble? You think he's going to thank you for that? I digress.

I face the fact that I'm terrorised by the world and wonder what to do about it.

*

The Charity Commission is called in and the fraud squad and I spend more afternoons in Hackney Police Station. What emerges, I guess you could say, is a picture of semi-conscious embezzlement. The police don't want to press charges. Having interviewed Dribbles, Fat Fiona, Clarence and Howard, they realise that these people are only dimly aware that there is a distinction between right and wrong. The accounts are frozen. Pedro and Marcus refuse to come to work. They are being paid directly by the council but require me to sign off their time-sheets at the end of the month. Pedro comes in with both their time-sheets and demands I sign them. I refuse. He thrusts his eighteen or so stones of ominous shadow over my reluctantly quivering frame but I still refuse. I so don't give a fuck. An hour or so later I get a threatening phone call from the pay section at the council ordering me to sign these time-sheets. The pay clerk is also the shop steward and informs me that his members are working from home.

"Working from home?", I say, "they're youth workers. What could they possibly be doing at home that we could sanction?" Click. I so don't give a fuck.

The Charity Commission advises an extraordinary AGM. Extraordinary hardly covers it. The police come in anticipation of a delegation of Dribbles's and Clarence's supporters. We had learned that Howard would be off doing a light show at a folk festival. The usual suspects begin to arrive. First the vicar, smirking through his zit-shaped lips, his tiny, pinny eyes just visible through his bottle-bottom glasses. Catching up with him is a new man from the bastard housing association. He's wearing a Donald Duck tie not quite wide enough to conceal the bursting buttons around his pillow belly. I dub him the beadle because he reminds me of Harry Seccombe in Oliver! The two enter, sniggering together.

A tall, thin, pinched, bald man with skeletal hands and no lips to speak of approaches me. "I'm a tenants' friend", he tells me. The council has hired him to "consult" with tenants about transferring the estate over to the bastard housing assocation. Despite the fact that this guy looks like a serial killer, I swallow my self-respect and try to be nice. More information is needed in this situation. Also present is the woman from the local regeneration partnership. Her name is Ruth Oxham and she is wearing a strange flower-print crepe dress of the kind grannies wore in the war. It has an open-stitched waist but no belt. I nickname her Oxfam because of the dress. She's about as smarmy as a woman can be and still call herself female. I make an appointment with her. Pedro and Marcus roll in, sneering. I clock them whispering at the back with the vicar and the beadle. A murky picture is starting to form. Watch out. Cuntocracy about.

An array of vacant looking residents trickle in. Some are familiar, some are not. Then, just as the meeting is about to begin, a dozen or so alert looking people file in and sit together, looking... well... ready for something. I don't think much of it. The situation is too surreal.

The meeting is being chaired, with no small amount of skill I might add by a big, friendly- puppy looking guy from the Development Trusts Association. He manages to wrong foot everyone in the room by being clever, funny, polite, dismissive, tough and cute all at the same time. In the circumstances, this is a totally unexpected miracle. The vicar tries to object as actual business is being conducted but is continually rebuffed and comes across as whiney and conceited. There is laughter in my stomach which was so recently just a pit. I hold my breath as the elections are announced. The vicar tries to nominate himself as chair.

"It is my understanding", says the great, big, wonderful puppy, "that these executive positions are only open to residents of the estate." This isn't actually true. It is not written anywhere in the constitution that the executives have to be residents. But no one else knows this. The vicar does not know this. If he'd said, "but the constitution doesn't say that", he'd have had a point and could have stood. But no. So arrogant is this vicar that he stands up and shouts, which startles everyone,

"This organisation has foundered, because it has been run by residents. Residents alone are not capable of running a community development trust, of being stewards of public funds."

That did it. Red rag. Bull. Work it out. There is an immediate stirring in the alert seats. A leader emerges. At first glance, he does not look too impressive. Standing about five foot three, he is rather pale and weedy. But when he opens his mouth, it's fucking evangelical.

"My name is Robert Cross and I have been a tenant on this estate for fifteen years." He pauses to allow the assembled to recognise him. "Look around you", he commands and is instantly obeyed, "there are senior council officers in this room, plotting, plotting to hand over this estate to that man." He points directly at the beadle who stupidly points to himself. The vicar shoots him a look of disgust and quickly crams a few inches of air between them. "That man, Eric Earnshaw, is from Hatfield Housing Trust and the council is going to give, give away this estate and somewhere in the region of fifty million pounds to that man. Hatfield Housing Trust is an organisation with no, no previous experience of managing an urban estate in a deprived borough. It has only one, one estate, in wealthy, leafy Hertfordshire and it can't even manage that properly. Hatfield Housing Trust is failing, failing to run a middle-class estate with nothing like the social problems we have here on the Goodwell." Gasps from the room. "That man sitting next to him", the vicar looks away, "for those of you who don't know him, is the vicar from St Vitus Anglican Church. He is also a director of Hatfield Housing Trust." Holy Dudley Fucking Doright, Batman, what a turn of events this is. "This is a blatant, blatant attempt to commandeer an organisation that was started by tenants on this estate. This is not to excuse the corruption that smeared the previous administration. But that man has no right to make the obscene, obscene suggestion that no tenant of this estate is capable of either competence or honesty. I nominate myself as chair."

Robert is voted in as chair. The woman who is sitting on his left is Maria del Mar Cruz, a Chilean who came to Britain as a student in the early seventies and could never go back. She is generally considered to be a bit of a nutter, but hey. She's elected as secretary. Slightly worrying is Robert's choice of running mate for vice-chair. Jim Sandys does have a history of alcohol-related violence. Although he appears sober tonight, I pack that portend away for worrying over later. Six of the other alerts put themselves up as directors and are elected. As my new committee and I get acquainted, a number of reactions begin around the room. The vicar, the beadle, Pedro and Marcus have surrounded the great puppy miracle who pulled off this extraordinary coup and are screaming at him as if he's just stolen the collection plate. As a final glorious finale, Dribbles and Clarence finally get past the police and rush in to announce that the election is illegal and they are the rightful chair and vice-chair. And that's my day.

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