Story for performance #510
webcast from Sydney at 07:33PM, 12 Nov 06

The car drifted along in the low afternoon sun. Voltz and me, we were following desert lines, looking out for desert flowers. I grew my hair long, forgot to shave. I had a beard for the first time in my life, and it felt primal, strange and artistic. I wanted to kill something.

Voltz kept clean, missed his sports car and watched the road for rabbits. He’d run them down, jump out of the car and take a photograph of them. When he got the film developed, there were no photographs of the two of us, just fourteen dead rabbits.

During the umpteenth photo shoot, I sat in the car, my feet resting on the dashboard, bored out of my brains. He got back in the car and told me that he knew a woman who made art out of road kill, that we should stop in on her house. She made a great cup of coffee, Voltz promised. She better, I thought, I hadn’t had a cup in nearly three days, just tea from a billy that was weaker than my mother’s bladder.

The drive up to her house was Australian grotesque. Skinned kangaroos, rabbits, wallabies, birds of all shapes, a wombat, I think, a dingo, scattered around the arid ground. There was an eeriness. It was art, Voltz said. I looked away. It was not art. It felt like murder.

Her house was, despite the deathly driveway, rather normal, even quaint. The furniture—Victorian? She wore a long smock, and her skin was as dried as some of the dead animals that inhabited her lawn. She looked like a woman from a Drysdale painting—dry as. She was parched, there was the word. The Australian sun had got to her, her brain too perhaps. It had certainly dried out her hair, it was frazzled, tangled, words associated with bad hair. She was so remote, so far from other women that, I suppose, she could afford to look like this.

She kept a dog, a black, mangy kelpie, the only living animal on her property. She said it as if it were something to be proud of. I felt like putting it down as soon as it brushed against me. It too was dry, a dry dog. It panted for water, but she gave it none. She did make good coffee though, not great, but good. She poured a little in the dog’s bowl. It lapped it up, like a truck driver does before the night is through. I had two cups and a little Anzac biscuit, from her oven, dry and parched like the Australian landscape, perhaps that is why they call it the Anzac. I swear it was laced with something that smelt sweeter than sugar. I said that I liked the fact that we had a military-themed biscuit, made of fucking oatmeal, but they did not laugh with me, and I laughed too hard anyway. I blame the biscuits.

It is hard not to draw this woman as a caricature. She was outrageous, she took off her smock, baring her naked body, and changed into a pair of men’s cotton pants, and sat with us, smoking joints. Voltz explained that they had been friends long ago. She was ten years older but they’d gone through the same schools and university. They’d lived in the same suburb, the only two to do anything that resembled creative work. They had met when Voltz was a mere twenty-one (hard to imagine Voltz at this age. It’s hard to imagine Voltz at any other age than that which he is at) in Nimbin, on the Northern coast of NSW, known for its marijuana. That’s all it’s known for. A long, green town with rainbows painted everywhere.

She passed me the joint again, and I mumbled something about rainbows. What was her name? Something that sounded like a stripper; indeed, she had been a stripper at one point. Kathleen, Karina? Something with that Ka—sound, very Australian, ka-ka-ka, like the khaki of everything.

The pot was starting to make her paranoid. She asked me if I had ever spoken to the CIA, showing me how she had cut all the lines to her phones. Voltz gave her a little back rub, and shooshed her gently. She relaxed back into her seat, covered in kangaroo fur, and smoked some more dope. She looked up into Voltz’s eyes, he into hers and she said she had something to show him. Whatever it was, they were a good half an hour looking at it, and they must have been banging whatever it was against a wall, repetitively.

I can’t believe Voltz sometimes, he’d just finished describing this woman as like an older sister as we approached the house in the car, and then he goes and fucks her, while leaving me on the couch with only a bowl of Anzac biscuits and a bag full of pot. The pot and Anzac biscuits weren’t so bad, and I stashed some away for later use, but still it was rude. Voltz came out of the bedroom without pants, as did Ka-ka-ka. She did have a bra on, for some inexplicable reason, but she discarded it as soon as she got in the kitchen. Voltz kissed her against the pantry. He was getting hard. I looked away, down at the dog, who was getting into the Anzac biscuits. Anzac biscuits and coffee, good life for a dog.

‘Voltz’, I cried, as he was about to start again.

‘What?’ he looked back at me vexed. I didn’t know what to say.

‘I’m going for a walk’.

‘Fine, fine’, he said and went back to his work.

I took the dog outside, found a tap, old bucket and laundry soap and gave him a good, honest scrub.

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Sam Twyford-Moore.