Worst Case Scenario - Being Peter To Save Paul (Part Three)

‘I quit this, I quit the trip. I go home. I work a string of meaningless jobs. Eventually I quit those too, and somehow manage to quit all the way to some dive bar in Tenerife, where I end up earning a living on my back, firing ping pong balls out of my vagina. I’ll scrape by, year after year, until my health quits on me and it’s time for the inevitable nursing home. There I’ll be force-fed soil by spiteful, undertrained nineteen-year-olds until I finally tire of living and, inevitably, quit that too’.

I gingerly approached Redback, making sure to give him a wide enough berth in case he lunged for me, and the scene of my strangulation ended up as a dodgy tattoo on his other arm. But when I told him, he said nothing - just smiled like he expected it. Like it had all been a setup from the beginning. Like the joke was up. And suddenly it all started to make sense. ‘This isn’t work, it’s neo colonial entertainment! All this is being filmed for some low-rent Australian gameshow, isn’t it? ‘Dingo Dares You’ - where they make unfit foreigners do minimal exercise until they pass out! What a waste of good humiliation. If you’re going to do a gameshow, do it properly: dump us in some godforsaken jungle and make us eat kangaroo dick to the delight of the sadistic, braying public’

Redback dropped us back off where we started. I’d just started to warm to him when he treated us to forty uninterrupted minutes of anti-immigration waffle. The irony of him trying to exploit cheap immigrant labour wasn’t lost on me, and the tension in the car became so thick you could cut it with a knife. ‘At least he’s not cutting US with a knife’ I thought. Silver linings and all that.

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They say the “third time’s a charm”. They fucking would say that though, wouldn’t they?

One afternoon, while doing my absolute best to talk myself down from jumping head first into purchasing the complete Depeche Mode box set on cassette from a 24 hour garage, Polish Joe came in saying he’d been working for a well-off banker who was, you guessed it, renovating a house, and they needed an extra pair of hands. The Boss was paying €200 a day for menial lifting and pushing - something that surely, surely, even I was capable of. I opted in and was to start the next day. 

For context, Polish Joe was a strong and able lad (he often dreamed of wrestling polar bears - and winning). The first task required of us was removing a brass bath from the upstairs bathroom and somehow getting it down three flights of stairs, out of the house, and into the skip sat parked over the road. By my estimate it was a four to six man job, but Joe convinced me to have a go, just us two. Half an attempt later, I felt that old, trusty back twinge and had to tap out. Undeterred, Joe carried the thing by himself, reinforcing his position as a totem of brute strength - hauling the thing down like a firefighter rescuing, well, a brass bath from a burning building.

My punishment for not having the spine for it was being tasked with skipping the metal cladding that was piled in the back garden. I was advised, as an afterthought, to put on a mask, as it was covered in asbestos. Upon hearing that I refused to touch it. In fact, I refused to stay anywhere near it. I wasn’t about to die prematurely of asbestos related lung cancer, just so this guy could get renters to pay off his mortgage - before flipping the place to keep his grown up kids with evil haircuts in endless cocaine and undeserved safari holidays.

By the afternoon the metal cladding had been removed by somebody else, and I felt slightly more comfortable with the gardening duty I’d been assigned. Unfortunately for all involved it took me all of two minutes to stop listening to the instructions I was being given, and almost  another two to rip up the fancy-looking long plant at the back of the garden.

Naturally, I did what all males do when presented with anything remotely phallic: I held the plant at crotch height and pretended it was my penis. For the first time all morning I felt correct, running around the garden with childish abandon, chasing off wildlife and lining up items on the wall to see what I could knock off - a true test of my new, enhanced member’s strength and a worthwhile one. 

A psychology student could probably diagnose the underlying cause, but I only have hindsight. Was it plain boredom? Or some unconscious attempt to reassert dominance after the demasculinising bath fiasco? Either way, I spent a solid twenty minutes practising the helicopter technique, swinging my leafy member in a circular motion until it made that satisfying whooshing noise. The goal, of course, was to get my swirling botani-dick rotating fast enough to lift off, even just by a few centimetres, enough to be considered airborne, before gently floating back to the hostel.

When physics refused to play along, I changed tack. I plucked a second, similar-looking plant and this time arranged them both on top of my head like insect antennae. “Eh, Joe - looks like that insect bite cream we put in the other night has turned me the other way!” I shouted from across the garden, before attempting to slurp a cup of tea through one of my new feelers. 

In an impeccable sense of timing, this also happened to be the exact moment The Boss walked back in…

“What are you doing?” he asked, incredulously.

“Oh, yeah… er, just pretending to be an insect” I offered, reattaching the antennae to my head as if that explained everything.

“Those plants were fifty dollars each” he lamented, not waiting for a response before walking off.

In my defence, he had told me to clear the weeds and clean the soiled area - but there were exactly two of those. 

I mean what am I? A bastard mind reader?

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And so, to the roof - which was large, flat, and half forgotten by man and beast. No one said it outright, but it was understood: this was my final shot.

“A simple two-parter” he motioned, holding his hand in a peace sign, as if I didn’t understand what the number two was. 

“First, sweep the stones and debris off.” A finger ducked down.

“Then hose it all down with the pressure washer.” 

The second finger stayed up. Must have been just as stupid as me.

“You can count on me…I think” my smile replied.

A full hour later The Boss climbed back up, presumably to make sure I wasn’t using the pressure washer as a stand-in penis - and found the roof looking somehow worse. Not only was it still full of rocks and stones, it was also now sitting under three inches of black water. He stood there, rubbing his face like he was trying to erase it. Calmly, but with authority, in the way someone speaks to an injured animal that won’t remain still, he said I should let it drain before giving it a proper brush down, then hosing it all off again. 

In that moment, whatever had been holding me together till that point, gave out. I’d come undone up there. On that roof, with the hose limp in my hands and water pooling at my feet, I’d taken stock of who I actually was.

I wasn’t a practical man. I wasn’t cut out for this kind of work. The simple tasks, the cleaning, brushing, lifting, carrying - felt impossibly foreign to me. It was like I’d missed some early lesson,  one everyone else absorbed without noticing, and now I was pretending to keep up, one mistake at a time. Sure, I could be difficult. Awkward. Reluctant. But those weren’t choices - they were a shield. They hid a truth I barely admitted to myself: that I often didn’t know how to function in a world everyone else seemed to have no problem navigating.

This wasn’t travel-specific. It wasn’t much better back home. I just happened to land in jobs I could work around, or stay under the radar in.

I came down and The Boss asked me if I was done and I confirmed that to be the case. 

“Yeah, yeah… brushed, hosed, did the drain thing, yeah,” I nodded.

Neither of us believed me.

But I was done. Done for the day. Done for good. It wasn’t even 11am.

He said he’d only need one of me or Joe to come back the next day, a not so subtle hint that he never wanted to see me ever again. I joked that I’d see him in the morning in that case, as I still had half of those plants to rip up, and there was a length of hose on the stairs that I had some solid ideas for.

He worked out what he owed me and underpaid me by twenty. Because rich people are rich, not stupid.

I took the long, untravelled way back to the hostel. I didn’t know where my legs were taking me, but my head wouldn’t shut up. 

I stopped at a 7-Eleven and spent the morning’s earnings on a couple of ginger beers, a notepad, and a pen. For me, writing things down had always felt like the right thing to do. 

With a pen in my hand and a blank piece of paper in front of me, I had the ability to escape into something I could do. Something I could control. A world where I made sense. At least to me.

It’d be a bit of a departure. I’d never explicitly written about myself, I hadn’t been brave enough. But I figured I’d just jot down a few thoughts. About the day I’d had, about all the cash-in-hand misadventures. About the strange, sun-bleached version of me who didn’t know what the fuck he was doing, but kept showing up anyway. About a man who’d spent most of his life improvising, singing the words but not understanding them. About a man cobbled together from borrowed confidence and bad timing. About a man not built for much. 

Except maybe this.