...in the backseat of a battered holden, feeling the beige vinyl squeak under my sweaty fingers as the reckless woman pushes us into heavy bush and scrub. hurtling down a track to a dark secret lake she cackles 'lets drive off the pier!'. thinking she is joking i laugh, nerve-ends jangling, but hurriedly throw my door open as we are indeed sinking into the poisoned lake and the water is black with chemicals. i must get out, the contamination is creeping tendrils through my skin as i flail to the shore. i clamber up the bank and already can feel my soles dissolving; gnawing slowly to the bone. must get back onto the road. but first, an obstacle course of thorny dense bush pointing in defiance at the night sky, shrouded in a cloying mantle of spider web. dark hairy shapes scuttle too and fro, menace drips like venom while they await my move...
...and the next thing i know i am on a beach, foam and sand swirling round my ankles. captain cook and several saucy chambermaids wallow in the shallows. he waves his cutlass and proclaims himself 'king of captains'; just like a gorilla beating his chest really. he whispers to a chambermaid: 'tomorrow?', she giggles inanely and lisps 'just before lunchtime'. suddenly i am there watching their hideous romping as he chooses pair upon pair of frilly pantaloons for her to wear...
...now captain cook is in the green velvet drawing-room attempting to impress a haughty group of french intellectuals with whatever he has read lately. they are bored and irritable; everything he greets with wide-eyed wonder, they snortingly dismiss as old hat. the scene shifts back and forth wavering between his bedroom and drawing-room antics. this is interrupted at intervals by the captain screeching to a halt outside the mansion in a gleaming red and brass mac truck. by the time i return home, i find my kettle has been possessed by a demon and is doing its utmost to wreck the flat.
copyright 1996 lisa bode