The police car followed mine into the KFC parking lot. I turned to Mum and said ‘hey look, the cops are hungry too… either that or they’re coming to arrest me!’ I laughed. One comedic beat later, they parked their car diagonally behind mine so that we could not escape and put the red and blue lights on.
To be clear, we were in a KFC parking lot. At lunch time. In Ipswich!
Many are the lows I have experienced, occasionally even engineered, but against them this felt positively artesian. As anyone with even a splash of self-awareness would, I like to eat my Kentucky Fried Chicken in private or, at the very least, in a corner booth under a faulty downlight in the mode of a noir detective; I am a cat that knows it is about to die, hauling its sputtering corpus to some private, low-foot-traffic niche to expire. The French might have la petite mort post orgasm, but I have mine after sampling the 11 secret herbs and spices. A brief, shameful loss of mind and soul before I swear to never do it again.
I first noticed the police car behind mine in traffic about 2km earlier. They had followed me through half a dozen intersections and as many acceptable locations where one might have pulled me over but the officers seemed to sense my bid for Colonel Sanders and waited patiently as I led them there, like an old-timey cartoon character chasing the wafting scent of a bait pie on a windowsill.
Two things are worth noting at this juncture.
First! Mum and I had been in Ipswich sourcing tiles and a new tap to finish a long-running overhaul of the laundry that I had promised despite precisely no enthusiasm for the project. The off-kilter situation of the new sink with respect to the old plumbing — apparently no one had noticed this until near the end of our low-fi renovation — required a new tap that could reach across to the sink and, by way of measurement, Mum had taken the old tap arm on a little excursion to show the various laundry people with whom we wished to consult the minimum size of the distance that needed to be bridged. Of course, she could have measured it in centimetres and travelled around with two digits in a notebook instead but that would have been easier and less visually arresting. Us Mortons love a prop.
It was this long, metal rod that she reached for her at feet when the police car hemmed us in and the officers got out of their vehicles. It might be confused as a weapon, she thought, and to avoid suspicion decided to wield it in potentially the most suspicious manner possible by picking it up and attempting to hide it on the backseat of my car. The second point necessary to understand in this moment is that Mum, bless her, has never broken a rule in her whole existence. We’re white, of course, and so her experience of law enforcement for the longest period of her life was that if authority figures said you were in trouble you must have actually done something wrong.
As readers of Dirt may know, my older brother spent a few months of his 20s in prison which was a difficult experience for everyone but possibly most difficult for Deb who suddenly took custody of my brother’s pet rat Bam Bam and who, having cultivated a belief that the police only ever went after truly bad people, was now forced to confront her definition of bad before having the gaze of the carceral state turned on her. She wanted to visit her son in prison and that meant submitting to its indignities. This surveillance, she believed, was necessary in the abstract but in person it felt like a vicarious accusation. Though I tried to provide counsel and levity in equal measure, these events took place near the start of our long and erratic familial relationship with the police and courts and Mum was starting from a low base.
There was one incident in particular that I remember so well because she called me sobbing about it. Mum had visited my brother and, inside the prison, gone to the bathroom. When she returned, she was shepherded into a routine sweep of the visitors by guards and their trained drug dogs and, horror, singled out by man and canine for being a potential prison drug mule. Deb, who seemed to have picked up trace amounts of prohibited something or other on her trip to the bathroom, was ever so briefly lit up like a criminal. Recently, while cleaning the shed, Mum came across the letter of complaint she’d written to the prison authorities demanding to know who the officer was that had temporarily detained her and also, for reasons that remain unclear to me, the name of the dog. ‘I wanted the truth, Rick,’ she says now. ‘All of the facts!’ Bless, I know where I get it from. Although I’ve never demanded a dog hand in his badge and gun.
In short, poor old Deb thought run-ins with the law were behind us all until this fine day in the Yamanto KFC parking lot, laundry tap in hand, her other son finally nicked for the brutal crime of not having transferred his licence over to QLD. Or so we thought. What had actually happened, I discovered, was that my licence had been suspended for reasons neither the police officer nor myself could presently work out. It was a NSW card and he couldn’t see beyond the fact of its status to the reasoning of some distant jurisdiction. And I hadn’t driven my car on any road in the state in 18-months. It was a proper mystery. The second officer moved around to the passenger side to check on Mum and her tap. ‘Hello ma’am,’ he said. She froze like he was the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, its vision based on movement. She just wanted her nuggets! Leave her alone!
I was also starting to get real hungry but my police officer was taking me on a completely unnecessary tour of all of my old driver licences.
‘You won’t be able to use your QLD driver licence,’ he said to me.
‘I don’t have one of those,’ I said.
But he said I do, actually, on their system. It was cancelled in 2013 when I changed over to a NSW licence.
‘That was cancelled in 2013,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘so you won’t be able to use that now.’
Was I losing my fucking mind? Why would I think I could start using a licence I haven’t had for more than a decade? The cop asked if I understood and I said, no, sir, I do not because I have a NSW licence that you are telling me is suspended.
‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘but you won’t be able to use your QLD licence.’ I also have an old ACT licence, too, but that didn’t seem to animate the guy nearly so much. Poor old Canberra, always forgotten.
‘How can I use a licence that expired in 2013,’ I begged him.
‘You can’t,’ he said.
Just move on to 2024 mate. I don’t have time to do Mike Munro’s This is Your Life.
Mum, freed from suspicion, sensed this ordeal was more complicated than she’d originally thought and offered to go inside the KFC and order lunch for us while the officer and me kept chatting. I’ve never seen her move so fast. It was like watching a cuttlefish dart off into the ocean depths. The other cop, having not paid much attention, asked: ‘Is that your Mum? And she’s got a full licence?’ Yes sir. ‘Then why are you driving on a suspended licence?’
Look, I know it’s not an excuse before the law, but I told him what I told his partner: this was all news to me. Certainly it’s my fault for not changing my address over but whatever fine had sat idle long enough to lead to a suspended licence was a mystery and I couldn’t figure it out.
I phoned NSW Revenue that afternoon.
My licence was suspended, the lovely woman explained, because I failed to vote in the NSW state election of March 2023 which, again, my fault — that was the final month of all consuming robodebt royal commission hearings — and I didn’t change my voting address until months later ahead of the Voice referendum and QLD local government elections. I was fined and did not pay the fine because I did not know it existed and, after a year, the fine converted to a suspended licence. Missed it by that much!
In December I was pulled over for unknowingly driving an unregistered car (OK, so when you lay it all out like this it does make me sound like an unreconstructed moron or someone who, at the very least, needs an assistant) there was no issue with my actual licence and I sorted out the paperwork and got on with my life.
Until this week.
It’s not the worst thing to happen in a KFC parking lot although I suspect Mum disagrees. After the police had moved on, I watched her eating her nuggets with the grim conviction of a captured spy cracking open a cyanide pill on a back molar. Of course, she’d rather I didn’t write about any of it. My friend Tom said I should but only if I withheld the fact we were going to KFC to eat because it might reflect poorly on me as a person.
One wonders if they’ve ever even met me.
There is a lesson here about doing your admin but if I learn it that would mean Mum was right. Aren’t they always? If nothing else, however, there is an answer to the question I get from so many people: how do you fit it all in?
I don’t. My life is a mess.
Observations
La honte doit changer de camp
There are some stories that arrive as depth charges in the body. The depravity of Dominique Pélicot, who admitted to drugging his wife Gisèle into unconsciousness and arranging for dozens upon dozens of men to rape her over the course of a decade, all the while feigning ignorance about her increasing alarm at what undiagnosed health condition might be causing her spell of blackouts, is merely the latest. Pélicot was only caught by accident, he was filming up skirts in public, when police discovered his meticulously documented folder of rapes he labelled ‘abuse’. The videos and photos showed his unconscious wife Gisèle being raped by him and 71 other men between 2011 and 2020. As the New York Times reported:
There are so many men on trial that the court had to build a second glass box in the courtroom for those in custody. They include firemen, soldiers, truck drivers, an IT expert. They range in age from 26 to 74. Many are in stable relationships and have children.
I lead with all of this, rather than the extraordinary determination of Gisèle Pelicot, because it was her husband that put her in the position where she needed to be a force of almost supernatural composure in the first place. For the same reason, I’ve included his photograph and not hers. She waived her right to an anonymous trial so that the world could see what was done to her, certainly, but what is done to women all over who do not have the sick administrative benefit of well documented abuse. There is much I could say but would only mess up. What I wanted to draw attention to is a phrase used by one of Gisèle’s lawyers, speaking on her behalf. She wanted to show, Stephane Babonneau said, that ‘shame needs to change sides’. In the original French: la honte doit changer de camp. Perhaps this says more about me, as this phrase is apparently a French feminist touchstone going back at least to the 1970s, but I had never heard it before. It stopped me in my tracks.
The Bungle Brothers
Mum is currently making a thank you present for the local veterinary practice for their ongoing care of Charlie the diabetic cat. Frankly, I think they should be making one for her because the diabetes has kept them in business and also Charlie is a very nice cat who never fusses or fights when he visits and is also very beautiful. He’s like one of those Danish chairs you see in the window of a designer furnishing store. Stunning, expensive and easily treated. Jack the blue heeler is not quite so amenable. Oh, he loves people and will be friends with anyone, don’t doubt it. But he is also a notorious grump who has taken the genetic disposition of the breed for ‘manipulation and obstinance’ to levels only accessible to the truly self-actualised heeler. At 14, Jack is so set in his ways that concrete is asking for a mentorship.
For her present, Mum has been making some sort of photo montage of the cat and I intervened to insist that it was rank favouritism to only be including the cat and that, given Jack has made his fair share of detours via the clinic and has even, at one point, shit on their floor (I was walking up town to get a coffee thank God otherwise I would have died), he ought to be included. Begrudged, Mum has now allowed the old boy into her thank you gift. In response, the vet was only able to successfully clip his toenails on one foot and I have spent the past week inventing new techniques to get the other one done. These techniques mostly involve surprise attacks where I can take the tiniest sliver of one nail at a time and, on one mildly successful occasion, a trust exercise where I held his paw with one hand while promising a Schmacko if he let me near his claws with the clippers. At this rate I estimate I will be finished by the time he turns 22.
Don’t Even Get Me Started on God Damned Bertha
The loudest chook I have ever met. They should put her on a ship as an emergency horn. Ridiculous animal. Zero stars.
Won’t Somebody Think of the Narrator
And so, the time has come as it always must, for me to read the audiobook version of my latest book Mean Streak. Unfortunately this is both the most complicated and also the longest thing I have ever written which means I will spend at least 25 hours this week, and possibly more, in an airless recording booth reading my own writing with at least a modicum of conviction. As I said to a friend, if you had to design the perfect torture device for me this would be it. I’m one day down and the level of concentration required is hideous. Look, I know there are much worse things in the world on paper and that I am very lucky and all of those usual caveats but I promise I am not being dramatic. I loathe recording audio for even an hour, in the same way that I used to dread doing The Drum (much as I loved its people) because the attention span it required just to be on was significant. But, as you may know, I am also a control freak and would never let anyone else record any non-fiction book I write. I choose suffering!
Okay! Wrap your head with cling wrap and ask Deb to slather it with peanut butter. While Jack licks the peanut butter off the cling wrap you or Deb clips his nails. Saw this in a meme vet nurses posted on Facebook.
I used to have to get my lad Otter, in a wrestler's grip with my legs to clip his nails. When it was over he would do zombies all around the house. Clipping dogs' nails is not for the faint of heart.
Every time I have seen a headline about that abomination of a man drugging his wife, and having her raped by over 70 men plus himself, I feel my body shrivelling and my breath stopping. Any person who has been raped would feel similar. Even those who have not, would feel similar to that, unless they, too, are abominations. Gisele Pelicot is like the Statue of Liberty shining a very bright light on where the shame needs to be put.
Apart from family and friends, yours are the only emails I read as soon as I receive them! The stories, the characters, the writing style: all good for the Spirit!!!