Thirty Thousand Bottles of Wine and a Pig Called Helga~A Not-So-Perfect Tree Change by Todd Alexander

Author:Todd Alexander [Alexander, Todd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B07DCF43MY
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Australia
Published: 2019-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

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Jeff had developed a new love affair as he’d finalised the designs for the villas: recycling wooden fences. Jeff took the palings and nailed them wherever there was a spare wall, so he was constantly on the lookout for free palings. No wall on the property was safe from Jeff and his nails. If Leroy hadn’t moved for more than an hour I gave him a little shove just in case Jeff thought he’d look better dressed in recycled hardwood. If someone was pulling down a fence on any road we drove down, Jeff would swerve the car over and ask to remove their palings for them. There was an almost constant scouring of Gumtree and, if he made a find, the next day we’d be on our way to the other side of Newcastle in a hire truck to stack palings dumped in someone’s front yard, a new Colourbond fence gleaming behind us as we worked. According to Jeff, Colourbond was the outdoor equivalent of net curtains. Our friend Merv seemed to spend his spare time patrolling the streets of his suburb looking for palings for Jeff too – in fact, it felt like Jeff had a whole army of people on the lookout for fence palings. But then one day in spring Jeff found the mother lode. A guy in Singleton wanted someone to pull down an entire yard full of wooden fence.

‘He wants a quote,’ Jeff said like Darryl Kerrigan from The Castle.

‘I reckon a grand is fair,’ I offered.

Jeff went off to make his call and returned a few minutes later. I was practically rubbing my hands together in his absence – that grand was sure going to come in handy for two destitute farmers.

‘The fence is ours,’ he said, all chipper and proud of himself.

‘Did you ask for a grand? Or more?’ I thought he might have been cheeky and try to hide a bit of cash from me just in case I hadn’t let go of the liposuction dream.

‘I didn’t . . . I told him we would remove it for free.’

‘Ha, ha, yeah, sure you did!’

‘I did, honestly. It’s just that we’re getting all those palings for free, it didn’t feel right to ask for money as well. Can you hire a truck for next week?’

To say I was against doing it for free from the outset would be a little misleading. There were a lot of things I was prepared to do for free but chopping down some guy’s fence was not one of them. I hired the truck as requested, not even flinching at the two-hundred-dollar-per-day charge, nor the knowledge that I would need to put in about eighty dollars’ worth of diesel. We got to the guy’s yard and were shown the side gate.

‘There she is, fellas.’

That was no suburban backyard, let me tell you. There must have been about five hundred metres of fencing. And no, it was no cricket pitch either. The backyard must have been at about

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