(diaryland) November 13, 2009 - 2:36 p.m.

It's that time again. Time to read my weird, badly thought out adventures.

Chapter the Tenth

I�m pretty sure that I sat in the truck, basically motionless, for the next four hours. I spent the time wondering whether I�d committed manslaughter or not, among other things. The taxi that was supposed to pick Vaughn up came, honked and left while I crouched behind the dashboard, and that had been ages ago.

Finally, as a bird in the street woke up from a bad dream, I willed myself to move. The first thing I did was rummage around the floor of the passenger side in order to find some rubbish. This took about 0.5 seconds. I grabbed the first thing that came to hand � an old, left thong. I�d once worn it and its friend on the beach when I had to go and find the reclusive man in the isolated shack who had ordered one hundred and fifty floating bicycles, all with little anchors that you could wind up with a pedal just behind the one you used to cycle across the high seas. I lost the right thong that day, trying to find that bloody shack in the scrub. That was a difficult and shaming day for me. A piece of inert kelp had stolen that right thong away from me. Inert kelp.

I rolled the window down and took aim. I wanted to see if the fountain was still live, so to speak. I released the thong, and it bounced off the rim of the top tier and landed on the grass, like an old, brown thong bouncing off a normal fountain would do. Shit. I had pretty good aim.

In a way, I wouldn�t have minded if the thong had been sucked into the fountain. Then it wouldn�t end up being landfill like it was destined to be. I would much rather have lost that to the fountain than my Biff�s Fleet hat, damn it. I was still cut up about that. It had given me some good shade when called upon to do so back in the day. But at least I knew now that the fountain was lying dormant for the moment. Perhaps it was sated.

I put one of the many half-thought-out plans I�d vaguely considered up until the midpoint of my long night into action. I drove out onto the street. I left the truck idling and ran to the shipping crate, opened it and threw Vaughn�s wheelchair in. It had the clunk of a rubbish bin being flung onto a nature strip. Then, I drove straight to Eldorado. I got there just as the sun came up.

Eldorado was a tiny, brown town that lived in the shadow of a huge dead gold dredge. Its entire tourism industry was made up of people who were going somewhere else making the detour to have a look at the dredge, lying there like the skeleton of a whale, in a puddle it had made itself. The gold dredge had been the loudest thing within 15 kilometres and had also been remarkably unsuccessful. Even the name of the town was a constant reminder of disappointment and unfulfilment. The whole place reeked of failure. It was a natural place to dump Vaughn Bourbon�s wheelchair.

I drove around the back of the cemetery, a place in which the final resting places of about seventy people were marked with painted white pebbles and bleached fake flowers, and wheeled the chair through dead raspy grass for ages. Then I dumped it in a crevice on crown land. As far as I could tell, this was the end of the earth. It had always been a place I�d thought about as the ideal area to dump a body. I�d driven around this town one time when I was completely lost actually trying to get a shipment of ectoplasmic unicycles to Beechworth after a break at Fontana�s truck stop. I�d done my hair in a beehive that day to get Fontana�s limited attention, and God, how it had worked. Mm. I thought about the chiko rolls he had, and the way they looked just as Fontana handed them down over the counter to me.

I could just see the sun in person now. Perfect time for a chiko roll. I couldn�t resist. I knew I�d said to myself I�d never bear the humiliation of seeing myself as a curiosity on Fontana�s Wall of Badly Photographed Truck Driver Oddities, but I was hungry. I ran through the grass and jumped back in the truck. My legs were coming up in allergenic welts.

The town was a corpse. I drove out, unseen, back onto the sole road out, which was ludicrously thin. Geez, they didn�t hold out much hope for themselves, I thought. It only took me forty-five minutes to get where I wanted to be.

I put my hair up in an emergency topknot, then bobbed up and down in front of Fontana�s counter.

�Oh, hey, gal,� said Fontana. �I didn�t expect to see you again so soon. Chiko roll?�

That was true. I had been there only a wee while ago. Everything that had happened, starting with the Atmospheric Skull, had begun four days ago. Unbelievable. There was a wall before that Atmospheric Skull, where everything before it felt like a series of meaningless motions. Everything on this side of the wall seemed to be symbolic, but it was just indecipherable.

Probably had no meaning at all.

My tummy rumbled and brought me back to the present. �Yep, one chiko roll for me, please.�

�Here you go, gal. And don�t say I didn�t go all out for my portrait of you on the wall � won�t you sign it now, to make it all official-like?�

�Oh, God,� I said, glancing up, facing the inevitable. There I was, one eye shut, the other nearly shut but with all the pupil and iris bits tucked away from view so I looked like I was having a fit. It kind of looked like I was hanging upside down, too. That�s what you get when someone takes a shot of you when you�re leaping around and you don�t expect it. I guessed there was probably worse on facebook. I hadn�t been on there in a while.

�Come on � I�ll let you have your breakfast on me,� encouraged Fontana. �I�ve got this lovely special pen here just for you and everything.�

It was a common ballpoint pen, lidless. I had billions at home.

�Oh, alright then,� I said. I had way bigger things weighing on my mind. At least this lidless ballpoint pen worked. That unto itself was kind of unusual.

I signed my crappy A4 overcontrasted photo, shakily.

It occurred to me at that very moment that I could make a half-arsed attempt at an alibi right now, just in case some lonely early-rising resident of Eldorado had been prying through their dust-choked curtains and decided they wanted to dob in a distinctively small female truck driver who donated wheelchairs to holes in the ground behind cemeteries.

So I said, �Hey, how about that Queensland, hey? All that rain or not they�ve got up there? I was just up there yesterday, visiting a banana plantation by myself - coming down back to Melbourne now, should get there soon, not long now, hey?�

Fontana stroked his chin and looked swarthy, which he was quite good at. �You sure are unusual, aren�t you, short stuff,� he said after a moment. �Maybe just one photo of you to put up on my Wall of Fame isn�t enough. Maybe you could hold the title for the most Incredibly Random Sentence, too. How�s about that?�

I could see him lunging for the camera again, so I sprinted out of that truck stop like nothing else.

I couldn�t think of anything else to do, so I drove home. As usual, I did not look to the left.

The countryside was getting browner now. Only last week, the hills on either side of the road were wearing clouds. Now, I could see to the horizon and to the lone burnt trees against the sky. I felt that there would be more burnt trees before the end of the summer.

I got home. Still no news from the fountain. I ran inside, slammed the door and peered at it from the sidelight. Nothing.

I turned on my computer. I thought, hey. Maybe I�ll e-mail Doctor Andr� and get him to talk through this with me. That was what support groups were all about, right? I knew perfectly well that my first go-to person was supposed to be my partner, but he�d just been sucked into a fountain, so Doctor Andr� was obliged to help me out, right?

So I very carefully worded a calm-sounding e-mail, which said this:

Hi Doctor Andr�, or Dave if you�re reading this,

I�m Anastasia from the Support Group. The short one with the magic fountain.

My magic fountain, well, it sort of ate my partner, Vaughn. He�s the wheelchair guy. I think I need to talk before next week.

If it�s Dave reading this, I ask you to pass the message on to Doctor Andr�. Today if possible.

Regards,

Anastasia Nemtsova.

I pressed send, and waited for an e-mail back.

Sure enough, after about thirty seconds, I got a reply.

It said,

LOL

Sounded like Dave�s work.

I wrote back,

Hey, Dave. Make sure you tell Doctor Andr�.

Regards,

Anastasia.

Immediately Dave wrote back,

i forgot.

I stared at the screen for a while. I pursed my lips. I blurred my eyes and looked at the white wall above my computer monitor. I closed my e-mail. Then I typed Vaughn�s name into a random Dynasty Warriors Story Generator to see what it would come up with, because I thought it would make me feel better if I imagined a mythical world inside the fountain, a world of adventure and possibilities, not a place where his body had been ripped apart to the very atoms by a blob of largely naked women and it being all my fault. It came up with this:

Vaughn tried to manipulate Huang Zhong on a war ship after having too much sex. Chased by an angry mob he defeated his nemesis, which caused a public outcry. A few hours later, his horse tried to convert him inside a rabbit hole and it caused a widespread panic.

Somehow, this comforted me. Plus, if I squinted my brain a bit, I could believe it. That satisfied me for all of about three minutes and then I started fidgeting again.

So I looked up Vaughn Bourbon on Wikipedia. He actually had a page all of his own. I was impressed. It told briefly of his Dad�s death in a stand-off with police on a long, disused road outside of Shepparton, and how his Mum bought him the gene test thing to cheep him up and how they found out he was royal, and how he was invited to France as the guest of its people, and then it had a very large, very impressive family tree diagram which was all huge on the right-hand side and had a great number of people on it who either were the exact same person in dual or even triple ancestral roles, or just mere unimaginative royal naming, and then converged on the other side to one name, Vaughn Bourbon. On the top right hand side of his Wikipedia entry was his name, the title �Honorary Comte de Chambord�, and �Pretender to the French Throne�.

Then it went on to talk about how his visit to France went horribly wrong and he got shot in that garden he�d talked about the night I met him. The Wikipedia page seemed to surmise that an assassination attempt could have been made by people who wanted Charles Napoleon, the Pretender to the Imperial Throne of France, to be top dog in the pretender scene.

I clicked on the link that promised more info at the bottom of the page, and was shepherded to a newspaper site, all in French. There was a lot of text that I couldn�t understand. I waited for the big picture on the side to load. They always load from the top, so at first I saw cloudy sky, then distant trees, then the subject of the photo. It was Vaughn, lying crumpled in a pool � nay, an ocean, of his own blood, with a dark blue raincoat covering his head. There was a crowd around him, kneeling and crouching over him to get a better look. A couple of policemen were standing around, looking nonchalant. The hedges in the background were huge.

I shrugged to myself and right-clicked on the image. Then I clicked, �Save as desktop background.�

Now Vaughn was lying there, behind all the files and program icons on my computer.

Then, straight after that, I got an e-mail. I thought at first that maybe a small miracle of competence had occurred and maybe Dave had actually passed my message on to Doctor Andr� and I was about to get a coherent reply. But, no. This e-mail was from an unknown sender.

It said,

wtf