The Secret Life of the Gold Coast by Brendan Shanahan

Author:Brendan Shanahan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

Clan of the Cave Bear

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, Jeremy’s heavy form crashed down on my bed and I awoke with a start. ‘Brendan!’ he whispered sharply, shaking my shoulder.

Jarred awake, memories of the previous night came flooding back. ‘What?’

‘Are you all right, mate?’

The sun shone brightly in the room. I was entirely conscious, but he continued to shake me back and forth as effortlessly as if I had been stuffed with foam rubber. In the last few weeks I had grown rather accustomed to these invasions of my person.

Jeremy was the loudest, the most frenetic and, in some respects, the most obnoxious individual I had ever met. I had, however, grown inordinately fond of both him and his girlfriend Lenore over the last few weeks. Jeremy was from Christchurch (although he would often pretend he was from Auckland, ‘Because it’s bugger’) and Lenore was from Rotorua. Lenore was quiet and hardy and although her devotion to her boyfriend bordered on masochism, she was not above openly mocking him. The beach and the promise of work had lured them to the Gold Coast, but things were proving tougher than they expected; unless they could find employment immediately they would have to make their savings last until Lenore started her position with the coaching clinic. It had never occurred to them that jobs might be scarce on the Gold Coast.

Physically, Jeremy was a giant. In height he was comparable to myself but the proportions of his body were less classical than mythic. So shattering was his laugh that the neighbours once complained; so frequent and impolitic were his pronouncements on everything from pedophilia to immigration that he was guaranteed to offend any casual visitor to our apartment. Like Bamm-Bamm from The Flinstones, Jeremy was a monstrous child, the id incarnate, equipped with the kind of physique that allowed him to do damn near anything and get away with it. He was a qualified greenkeeper, but without employment he had only two major activities: going to the gym and bounding around the living room with his shirt off like an Irish wolfhound who has just devoured a bottle of ritalin. He said a doctor had once diagnosed him as manic-depressive but when I asked whether he often felt depressed he said he could not remember a single incident. The more accurate diagnosis, I thought, was closer to manic-manic.

Jeremy vacillated between two extremes: everything in his world was either ‘the greatest’ thing he had ever experienced or ‘the gayest’ (as in, ‘Conan was the greatest movie ever made’, or, ‘This milkshake is gay’, or, ‘Australia is the gayest country in the world’). He had a number of alternating obsessions: body building, food, the life of Arnold Schwarzenegger, martial arts (specifically nunchakus), anal pornography and chairs, the ergonomics of which he could discuss for hours and at great volume. As a professional greenkeeper, he also had a mania for grass and would explain at great length and with tender relish the different species that could be grown on lawns or golf courses throughout the world.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.