Mr Ordinary Dons a Disguise

Copyright © Benjamin Allmon 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by Odyssey Books in 2018

www.odysseybooks.com.au

A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia

Author: Benjamin Allmon

Title: Mr Ordinary Dons a Disguise / Benjamin Allmon

ISBN: 978-1-925652-01-7 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-925652-04-8 (ebook)

Cover artwork by William D Higginson

Typeset by Odyssey Publishing

For Mike,

For want of a willing ear, a story is lost:

So many times you’ve spared me that fate

Table of Contents

The Karma Tree

Dicky’s Dilemma

The Trouble with Frank

Weiji

The Avocado Soldier

The Great Step Sideways

1001

I Am Darryl’s Liver

The Logic Cult

The Great Reversal

Orgasms with Orgasms

Going Somewhere?

Spark

White Collar Chant

The Whian Whian

Acknowledgments

About The Author

The Karma Tree

This story first appeared in Aurealis #53, August 2012

Artwork by Lynette Watters

Back in ’08 I lived in a share house where this crazy girl pretty much ran things. She’d been there the longest; I know that counts for something, but otherwise she was pretty fucking dumb. She had this plant growing by the front door. A Karma Tree, she told people when they first moved in. It never needed water, apparently, just grew if the housemates did good deeds and withered if we didn’t.

‘How does the plant know?’ I asked on my first day tour of the house.

‘It just, like, knows, you know?’

‘Right.’

‘You’re full of shit, Kerryn,’ yelled the Wizard from his place on the couch. The whole time I lived there he was permanently ensconced between the cushions. We called him the Wiz.

‘Who is the plant to determine what’s right and wrong?’ he continued. ‘What if I did something that hurts one person but saves hundreds?’ He picked up the remote and flicked through channels with blinding rapidity before coming to rest on the gleaming bonce of Dr Phil. ‘Or, I dunno, run naked through the middle of town. I say it’s good, but the cops’d bust me ‘cos the law says it’s bad, and what the hell happens to the fucking tree in that instance, you stupid hippie?’

‘Shut up, Wiz,’ Kerryn muttered.

‘Hey, let’s smoke the Karma Tree,’ yelled Rebecca from the kitchen. Rebecca was always stoned, as I came to find out.

‘Shut up, Bec,’ Kerryn muttered, then took me by the arm and led me on the rest of the tour.

Kerryn had a cat she called Karma Cat, and explained to me it worked on a similar principle as the Karma Tree.

Do good—happy cat.

Do bad—angry cat.

There must have been an awful lot of evil perpetrated in that house, because that cat was one pissed-off motherfucker. Whenever it saw anyone it would scurry forth and latch onto an ankle, its claws and teeth like needles in the thin flesh. The Wiz must have booted the Karma Cat for all he was worth on a daily basis, but the little fucker never learned.

So there was the Karma Tree, the Karma Cat, and Kerryn. She, like most New Age idiots, was an idiot. She’d talk about saving the planet, and then get into her shitheap of a car that belched black smoke so thick you couldn’t make out the sticker on the bumper that said ‘You can’t hug kids with nuclear arms’. She’d talk organic this and environmentally friendly that, but couldn’t seem to sort the recycling and always left her bedroom light on, sometimes for weeks.

Rebecca was a much better housemate. Apart from being permanently stoned, she was a fabulous cook and easy on the eyes. I guess being a good cook is a natural outgrowth of having the munchies 24/7, but man, some of her dishes were out of this world. You’d come home and before you even walked up the steps to the front door and punted the Karma Cat out of the way, an armada of scents would assail your olfactory and set you to drooling. You’d stick your head into the kitchen and there was Bec, the mistress of the armada, hand on the tiller (or wooden ladle, in this instance), hair done up in a loose horsetail, a joint poking out between her lips and a dreamy, faraway look in her red eyes. You’d say, ‘Hey Becs, whatcha cookin’?’, and she’d say ‘Chili’ and there you’d go. Bowls of chili for the next three days, and as anyone will tell you, chili is like wine: it only gets better with age. When Bec wasn’t cooking or laughing at pencils, she worked at the local video store.

* * *

I went in to rent a video one night about a year after I moved in, and she didn’t recognise me at all. Her eyes were red slits; a serene grin floated on her face.

‘Hey Bec,’ I said, ‘busy?’

‘As a bee,’ she replied after some time. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘Bec, it’s me. Oliver. Ollie. From home? Our home?’

‘I don’t think we have that, but I’ll check,’ she said, not moving. Her hands traced the counter, briefly pausing over changes in the topography—a pencil, a hair-clip, a small rubber effigy of Ronald McDonald. He was grinning, too. I thought about renting a movie, but all that grinning unsettled me, and I left.

When I got home, the Wiz was on the couch. He didn’t look particularly arcane in his tracksuit and mismatched socks, and the beanie wasn’t much of a magician’s hat when you got right down to it. He was watching netball.

‘This sport is fucked,’ he said as I entered the living room, sidestepping the attack of the Karma Cat, whereupon its clawed feet carried it skittering past on the polished floorboards, flying out the front door and into the night.

‘It’s not so bad.’ I shut the door and went to the fridge to see if there were any beers left.

‘Nah, it’s too fucking hard to understand,’ he replied, but went on watching it anyway, one hand fondling his genitals through the track pants. I decided to take my beer out onto the back balcony.

* * *

The house was an old Queenslander, wooden floors all the way through, even the bathrooms. It was bitterly cold in winter. You never went anywhere without socks on; the floorboards were like ice. It had a big balcony that overlooked a run-to-shit lawn out back. The clothes line poked out of the long grass and the feral blackberry like a withered steel tree.

I sat in one of the plastic chairs and drank my beer, looking out over the rioting lawn. The full moon had washed it a silvery non-colour and a soft breeze whispered through the long grass. The Wiz said he’d seen a family of wallabies living there last summer, but I doubted it. We were in the western suburbs of Brisbane, and I thought the chances of a flock (or a pod, or a frolic—who knows?) of wallabies spending a whole summer in someone’s backyard were slim. The Karma Cat would have been into them, for one thing.

The wind gusted a little harder, and the clothes line moaned on its rusted axis like a bad idea. A shiver ran through me. I’m not into premonitions and precognition—that was more within Kerryn’s purview—but that groan and the cold night wind seemed like a bad omen.

There was a knock at the door, loud enough to be heard over the Wiz bemoaning the mysteries of netball and the sound of Michael Franti (whom I heartily despise after my time in that house) rapping through the walls of Kerryn’s room.

‘Can someone get that?’ yelled the Wiz, even though his couch was three short steps from the door.

Franti kept telling us that everyone deserves music (his, presumably), and the knocking came again, louder this time.

I sighed and got up, carrying my beer back into the living room. The Wiz was right ruminatively kneading his junk and squinting at the television.

‘Someone’s at the door,’ he said as I walked past.

‘No shit.’

I figured it would be Bec, baked and unable to remember where her key was, despite the fact we never locked the door. The last time this had happened she had had the key in her hand, blinking at it owlishly as though it was some mysterious artefact.

I opened the door and for a moment I thought it was Bec. This woman was about the same height, but that was where the similarities ended. Where our housemate was vague, smiling, and never quite there, this woman was alert, agitated and—when she grabbed my arm, burying the fingers into my shamefully soft bicep—very much there.

‘You’ve got to let me in,’ she said.

‘Wha …?’

‘Please! You’ve got to help me, quickly!’

I allowed her to push her way in, feeling slow, stupid and acutely incapable. Guys on television—like those in the Acronym Bunch, CSI, NCIS, CI, SVU—always seem to know what to do in crises despite any adequate understanding of the situation, and always seem to get it right. All I could do was stand there flat of foot and make inquiring, vowel-heavy noises.

‘Aaaa, haaa, oooo …’

‘Hi,’ I heard the Wizard say companionably. ‘Do you understand this fucking game?’

She turned to me and I noticed she was quite cute, terror notwithstanding. Short brown hair and large brown eyes, she looked a bit like an elf.

‘Shut the door!’ she said.

‘Gaaah!’ said I, and pushed the door shut with dreamlike slowness. She was still clutching my arm, and although painful, it was quite nice. It had been a while since my last female contact.

‘Doesn’t it lock?’ she asked, incredulous.

‘Aaaah … don’t. Know. I mean, that is, we’ve never tried.’

She let go of my arm and ran fleetly across the floorboards to our rudimentary dining set. Picking up one of the mismatched chairs, she ran back and wedged it under the doorknob. I looked at her, then at the Wiz to see what he made of this bizarre turn of events.

‘What, so you can’t move once you get the ball? Is that right?’ he hollered at the room in general.

‘Um, hey, are you all right?’ I said, having recovered the power of intelligible speech. I reached out to her tentatively. She checked her improvised lock, and then turned to face me. I couldn’t get over those eyes. They were so large, fringed with long lashes. She was wearing a pink t-shirt and jeans.

‘No, not all right,’ she said, running a hand through her close-cropped hair. ‘I’m sorry to burst in on you like this, but I had to. I’ve tried knocking on every door in this street, and nobody answered.’ She kept looking at the door, and the chair propped against it. ‘Can I hide here for a while?’

I nodded.

‘Something very bad is after me.’

‘Huh?’

Before she could answer, Kerryn appeared in her bedroom doorway. The sound of Franti increased appreciably.

‘Who are you?’ she demanded. Her shirt had Che Guevara’s monochrome visage on it (only she pronounced it Che Guava, which always sent me and the Wiz into hysterics imagining the Cuban Revolution being led by a pink fruit in a beret).

‘This is …’ I began, then realised I didn’t know.

‘Bliss,’ the girl said.

‘Why is there a chair under the door?’ Kerryn said.

‘Because something very bad is after her, and our door doesn’t lock,’ I said. Turning away from her I said, ‘Do you want a beer? Some leftover chili?’ Bliss shook her head.

‘What the hell is going on?’ Kerryn advanced on us. Before Bliss or I could answer, the Wiz bellowed from the couch, scaring us all.

‘When is someone going to slam dunk, for fuck’s sake?’

‘Aaaah!’ I cried, miserably aware I sounded like a teenage girl in a horror film.

‘Shut the hell up, Wiz,’ Kerryn said, and then looked back at us. I could see she’d taken an instant dislike to Bliss. ‘What do you mean, ‘something bad is after her’?’

‘Worse than you can imagine,’ Bliss said.

‘Look, will someone please tell me what’s …’ Kerryn began, but Bliss cut her off.

‘Can we please move away from the door?’ Bliss said, directing this comment to me, whom she had latched onto as her benefactor and provider of sanctuary. It made me feel pretty damn masculine.

‘Sure,’ I said, and led her over to the couch. ‘Move over, Wiz, for Chrissake.’

We all sat on the couch, except for Kerryn of course, who stood with her arms folded over the Guava’s noble countenance.

‘I said …’ she tried again, but Bliss interrupted her a second time. It was quite unintentional I’m sure—I was coming to realise she was in a state of terror so acute her mind was tottering like a dreidel at the end of its spin.

She took my hand and said, ‘I’m a screen printer.’ She pulled her shirt away from her chest. ‘This is one of mine.’ She smiled. It was a strange smile, pride and bitterness mingled together.

At first glance, the shirt seemed innocuous enough. Candy pink and with the vague impression of teddy bears cavorting. It was only on closer inspection that one noticed the bears were engaged in sexual congress with a cartoon representation of the Prime Minister. Even closer inspection revealed that the Prime Minister was positively beaming as he was enthusiastically rogered by the small cabal of stuffed toys. The bears were smiling too, but nowhere near the unfettered joy evident in our supreme master.

‘That’s fucking awesome,’ said the Wiz, his attention diverted from the television at last (I suspect it was the opportunity to stare at a woman’s chest with impunity).

‘It’s disgusting,’ Kerryn said, arms still folded.

‘Actually, it’s both,’ I said, grinning, ‘which makes it brilliant.’

Bliss flashed me a smile that got my stomach doing funny things. In that moment I would have thrown myself at whatever had scared her so. It was a thought that came back to haunt me as the night wore on.

‘I’ve made dozens of these. I sell them at the university markets on Wednesdays.’

‘Bet you make a killing,’ I said.

She shuddered. ‘You bet. I’ve sold out week after week, but last Wednesday I discovered I’d attracted a different kind of attention.’ She ran her hand through her hair again, and I couldn’t help glancing at the door, and the chair wedged against it.

‘I was closing the stall at the end of the day, when I found a shirt in the rack that wasn’t one of mine. I held it up and it looked a lot like my work, only in the cartoon it was me with the teddies, and they were … decapitating me.’

‘Holy shit!’ exclaimed the Wiz, still staring at her small breasts under the shirt.

‘What did you do?’ I asked instead.

‘I freaked out,’ she said, then laughed. There was a cracked, jagged note in it. ‘I couldn’t decide if it was someone’s idea of a joke, or if it was some weird student stalking me, or what. When I got home that night I asked my boyfriend Sam what I should do. He told me it was nothing, just a harmless prank, or maybe a competitor trying to scare me out of business.’

I was barely listening.

Boyfriend.

Figures.

‘I’m guessing Sam was wrong,’ the Wiz said. Boyfriend or no, he was still ogling her chest.

‘Yeah, well, I decided to give it one more shot today. I set up my stall as usual. It was quiet, much quieter than normal. There were barely any students and the stall next to me was empty. I assumed the owner had gone off for a coffee.’ She reached out and grabbed my hand, horror transmogrifying her face as the memory gripped her.

‘That guy’s stall … it took me a few hours before I noticed, and I should have, because no one ever came back to tend it, which is weird, isn’t it?’ She looked at me, horror swimming in those liquid eyes. ‘The guy’s shirts … there were dozens of them hanging from the wooden beams, like hanged men, and every one had a cartoon of me or Sam getting killed by teddy bears. On one I was getting crucified, little bears hammering nails through my palms and feet. In another, Sam was getting disembowelled with a meat hook. I think I was more upset by the ones that depicted him … dying. I mean, he hadn’t done anything wrong; they were using these horrible images of him as a way to get to me …’

‘Gotta be the government,’ said the Wiz. His parents were Generation X through the middle—to them (and their son) everything was government conspiracy. Bliss didn’t seem to hear.

‘I was so scared, I kept trying him on my mobile, and all the time those shirts hung … swung … in front of me.’

‘Government,’ the Wiz repeated, this time with an air of finality. ‘I mean, you gotta figure some flunkies were mighty pissed at seeing their illustrious leader taking the money shot from Paddington.’

Bliss kept talking as though unaware there had been any interruption, still gripping my hand. I saw her nails were ragged. I agreed with the Wiz, but said nothing. From the look on her face, we still hadn’t heard the worst of it. I glanced again at the door.

‘The phone kept ringing, and I was all alone in the