If I want to see more people than I can count on one hand, I have two choices within a half-hour drive of home: Camperdown and Colac.
Of the two, Camperdown is the smaller, nicer place. The red-brick splendour of its buildings and a main street wide enough for a team of drovers to drive a mob of cattle or sheep down attest to the town’s farming origins. The early settlers saw their town was on the up and up, and built accordingly.
Somewhere during the twentieth century, amid World Wars, farming recessions and droughts, Camperdown’s progress faltered. Now it’s a monument to past agrarian prosperity in a windswept, melancholy landscape – a convenient lunch-stop for Melburnians en-route to seaside holidays, and truckies bound for Portland or the South Australian border.
The oversized clocktower at the principal crossroads still catches me by surprise, provokes a chuckle. It’s an ostentatious French Gothic hard-on in the little town’s sleepy, rural lap.
Under new ownership, the Bullen Merri Hotel on the corner has resumed its monthly acoustic jams. The saloon bar is all dark polished wood, the cosy gloom marred only by big TV screens that catch the drinker’s eye with mute games of footy and silent, baffling newsbreaks.
Outside, it’s a chill Sunday afternoon in May. In here, there’s a fire in the hearth, beer on the table and the craic is on.
Red-faced and whiskery, Keith is yelling at me across the table.
‘When you gonna bring that accordion, Benny boy?’
I’m a slow student, but he’s confident I can tame the Italian monster with its hundred and twenty bass buttons and four-octave keyboard. A late-night online impulse buy, it’s magnificent, all ivory and black-lacquered wood.
‘When playing it stops feeling like wrestling a bar fridge,’ I yell back. ‘Till then I’ll just embarrass myself on the banjo, thanks.’
‘It’s all in the bellows, mate. Pull and droop – lift and squeeze!’
It’s a cracker of a session. The music’s eclectic: Irish pub classics, English, Scottish and American folk, old-timey Appalachian, bluegrass and country; the occasional detour into Delta blues.
Keith wrings melodies and rhythmic wheezes out of his squeeze box while his daughter Anna plays jagged-sweet arpeggios on mandolin. All flavours of guitar playing are represented, from delicate fingerstyle to dizzy-fast flatpick to artless strumming. Harry wails and twangs on his lap steel. Padraig has brought his bodhran and a new woman from Cobden whose name I didn’t catch plays fiddle. The ukulele crowd bash the bejesus out of their tiny guitars. From somewhere over toward the bar, I catch occasional strains of harmonica.
I’m a middling player and prefer to sit at the back table, deflecting invitations to take a lead break.
It’s difficult to take my eyes off the new fiddler. She has a big, pale face, curly black hair with strands of silver. Her occasional smiles are fierce, intense: flashing teeth and crimson lipstick. She sings in a smokey contralto with occasional startling falsetto flourishes, as melodramatic as her playing. She’s wearing a tight, black, lacy thing.
In all honesty, she’s a bit OTT for a pub session. I catch one of the women mouthing ‘diva’ to another, across the table.
The beer, wine and sundry intoxicating beverages flow more freely than they should, considering most of us are driving home. I’m one of the first to leave, having a longer drive than most. The session looks set to continue well into the evening.
Emerging from the twilight of the bar, I blink into the bright, low sun of late afternoon. Bang – straight into one of my attacks.
Not just a patch of lost vision this time. I’m copping the full programme in glorious Technicolor. Jagged lines seethe and scintillate. Crenellations pulse like medieval ramparts in an acid dream. The skin of my face feels hot, dry and tight.
I’m by myself on the footpath, banjo case at my side. I can’t see a damn thing. I can hear the traffic rushing – between me and the sanctuary of my car. Returning to the pandemonium of the pub is unthinkable. Even if I could find the door.
Oh, bollocks.
‘Are you alright?’
The voice is female. I glimpse pale features, black curly hair. I try to answer. It comes out as something like ‘Oh, uh, fine.’
‘You don’t look fine. Do you need help?’
The face is closer now, leaning in. Features jumbled like a Picasso. The single eye is black and matte as a jet button, the white nose jabs like a beak, the crimson lips twist and writhe.
‘You were at the session in the pub … Oh, a migraine? I get them too. Nasty things.’
Conversation is hard. Leave me alone.
‘I’m going to drive you home. Where do you live?’
I don’t want to be driven home. I want her to fuck off. How will I get my car back?
‘Oh, God. Out there? Ah, well. Give me your banjo, I’ll put it in the back … Your car? Well you can’t drive like this, you’ll kill yourself, or someone else. Besides, you’re over the limit. I saw you, knocking them back. I’ll come by in the morning, pick you up.’
Before I know it, I’m sitting in the passenger seat of her car and we’re heading up Manifold Street out of town.
I’ve lost control of my life. This bloody woman has hijacked it.
Mercifully, she stops talking.
The aura lasts most of the way home. As we turn into the driveway, it starts to lift. Soon it will be replaced by pain like a lobotomy without anaesthesia, then nausea and lethargy until I sleep.
‘Lovely! You’re a farmer, then?’
‘No.’
‘Sorry, I know you don’t feel like talking. Oh, I’m Mercedes.’
She pronounces it the Spanish way: mer-the-thez. I try to repeat it, get one -th- too many in there somehow. Arse.
‘You’d better call me Mercy or Merc, everyone does.’
‘Benjamin.’ Why so formal? I never call myself Benjamin. ‘Thanks for the lift.’
‘Eight-thirty?’
‘Sorry?’
‘In the morning.’
I’m baffled. I stand next to the car, banjo hanging at my side.
‘To pick you up. Go get your car.’
‘Oh, there’s no need.’
‘You’re just going to leave it in Camperdown until it gets towed away?’
‘Ah. Not with it yet … Yeah.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yes, thank you, that’d be great.’
‘See you then. Half-past eight. Bye.’
And she’s off, leaving me gawping in her dust as if the mothership has swooped down to pick her up.
Next week in Blind Spot:
Chapter 3: Mercy Calls
Ben struggles to catch up with the flow of events.
Acknowledgement of Country: This story is set on the lands of the Djargurd Wurrung, while the author lives on Wadawurrung country. I pay my respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.
Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction. Characters, institutions and organisations mentioned herein are the product of the author’s imagination. The locations are based on real places.
Steve, I love how you depict the scene in detail. 👏👏👏
I’ll have to wait to know how Ben catches up with the flow of event in the next chapter.
“Banjo” and “Benjamin” has a rhythm 🥁