Category: Davey Dreamnation (page 9 of 31)

AFTER HOSING DOWN their uniforms and supervising the hideous clean-up task, de Burgh and Bo Dean caught a cab back to the city for their de-briefing. It would have been easier to take one of their own cars back but as both were now in a long-term parking lot, it was easier to catch a cab and charge it to HQ. Besides, they’d be back on duty by nightfall anyway ñ Enya would be heading skywards for Vanuatu as a plain clothes officer, while Bo Dean hoped to join in the sniffer-dog training being conducted at a secret carousel location.

“Well,” Enya sighed, as the cab sped past the old Fairfax newspaper factory, now a reconverted printing press for POD poetry titles, “that was enough gory detail for me.”

“Yeah,” Bo Dean muttered, “and a damn shame too.”

“Meaning?”

“She could have led us right to the heart of the whole trash novel cottage industry, you know? Ever since it went underground they’re getting harder to catch.”

“Well, if you ask me, that woman’s little stunt was free advertising for us. JC said he found about a dozen Wilbur Smiths in the men’s – ”

“Yeah well JC’s just a can-snoop. The whole world’s full of these books, you can’t say that some woman blowing herself up sends a message to anyone, let alone passengers at an airport.”

“Clint, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“Oh.”

They fell silent for a moment, slightly mesmerized, as the cab passed what used to be the Citylink cheese stick, now covered with the words of a poem by Oodgeroo. The driver accelerated past the Flemington Road turnoff and entered the giant pantoun superstructure that transformed the sounds of traffic into villanelles for the listening pleasure of the Kensington public housing tenants. Bo Dean remembered his first gig as a poet had been held there, inside the housing estate, in front of an audience of several thousand.

“What’s on your mind, Clint?” Enya asked.

“I can feel a poem coming on.”

“Oh, wow. Can I hear it?”

“Sure. Driver, change of plans. We’re going back to the airport. To the Hotel Formule 1.”

Enya grinned.

“All class.”

Bo Dean grabbed his Personal Life Organiser from inside the standard AP issue canvas bag and began to interface with the Hotel Formule 1 online system, booking a room with two bunks. Then he switched his PLO over to the AP mainframe, and let his superiors know via a browned-out microwavable thought pattern that he and Enya would be an hour late for their debrief.

Almost instantly Captain Enron was on the visuals, his cauliflower nose, a product of a lifetime of drinking sherry, butting almost through the holographic screen.

“Bo Dean, you tell that cab driver to turn around right now. We’ve got no time for your poetry readings in bunk bed rooms. Hell, if you were in France, I’m sure you’d be ordering the buffet dinner too about now. As it is, you’re in Melbourne, and we need you here for that debrief.”

“But Captain, I think we actually need a bit of time out after this one. The woman blew her own head off with a Colleen McCullough! Jeez, I think a buffet meal would be the least I could expect! Lucky for you that’s a Euro-only deal, hey.”

“Look, their rooms may be modern and cleverly designed. They may contain a double bed and a bunk, a washbasin and mirror, a corner table, a TV for viewing national channels and, in France, Canal+ and Sports+. The toilets and showers may be located just outside the room. The showers may be spacious, spotless, and well equipped, with a dry area for toiletries and clothing. But all of that being said Bo Dean, we’ve got a crisis here.”

Bo Dean sighed. It always ended up like this.

“Shoot.”

“Well, it looks like we’ve got an infiltration of Dan Brown readers in the Air Poet training program.”

“You mean ñ ”

“That’s exactly what I mean. We’ve found some evidence ñ ”

“Evidence?”

“Yes, some early drafts of what looks like a plagiarised version of The Da Vinci Code. The Chief says you might like to have a look at this one personally.”

“Really? Why me?”

“Because it was found in your locker, toilet head!”

Oh,” Bo Dean said, turning pale this time.

CLINT BO DEAN ran his finger along the zipper of the middle-aged woman’s travel bag.

îLooks like you’ve got a lot of reading ahead of you, ma’am! Anything you can recommend in here?î

The woman’s harried look gave Bo Dean pause; however he kept on with his goofish routine, in the hope that she’d save him the trouble of actually going through the stuff.

“Well, there’s the new Dorothy Porter best-of!”

“Of course!”

“A-and, maybe one or two debuts, you know, chapbooks, just off the press.”

“Anyone I might have heard of?”

“Um, this guy called Murray?”

“Les Murray?”

“Yeah, he’s pretty good. Quite promising stuff, actually.”

Bo Dean sighed. He felt like starting off this next phase of the interrogation with a line like “You disappoint me Ö” or his old favourite, “You have failed me for the last time, AdmiralÖ”

Instead he signalled for his fellow Air Poet, Enya de Burgh (no relation), to cease her own random bag checks and join him at the inspection counter. A line of relieved looking travellers picked up their bags and filed, in an orderly fashion, towards their departure gates.

“Sir,” Enya said, matter-of-factly.

“Enya,” Bo Dean whispered, pulling his colleague out of earshot of the increasingly nervous woman, “I’d like you to witness this.”

“Anything suspicious, sir?”

“Well, of course, it’s too early to tell. But I think we may have a Dan Brown reader on our hands.”

“Oh, for Christís sake. I thought that guy went down the vanity press route years ago.”

“Well, you know these self-publishers!”

“Yeah!”

Enya ‘s grin betrayed her own excitement. They hadn’t had a bust like this one in weeks. In fact, things here at the airport had become increasingly dull, inversely proportional to the amount of poetic diversionary material making its way back into the popular culture. The number of trashy self-help books, sci-fi novels and conspiracy theory expositions had steadily declined, leaving the airport retailers no choice but to go along with the Air Poet revolution. Now these formerly trade outlets stocked only the latest releases by both local and international poets, in attractive and harmonious displays. Passengers barely dared to board their flights without purchasing one or two of these immaculately presented and reasonably priced books, for fear of an immediate cavity search or ñ worse ñ an Air Poet raid, like this one.

This subservience made Clint and Enya’s jobs boring for the most part, though they of course did not complain, being busy writing their own debut collections in their spare time, and having exchanged chapbooks only just last week. Their relationship, if one could call it that, showed signs of moving beyond the end of the line, and into that hazy space known to poets as enjambment, where anything can happen.

But wow, a Dan Brown! Most Air Poets only dreamed of such a score! Mixed in with Bo Dean’s excitement, however, was a feeling of slight revulsion. There was something about the kind of paper these publishers used that set off an allergic reaction in his palms and he didn’t like touching the damned things one bit. Hence Enya’s role in this particular bust.

“Okay ma’am, we’ll just have to open this one up. If you don’t mind.”

Bo Dean motioned for Enya to begin taking the so-called poetry books from the woman’s vast and cavernous bag. To her credit, the first two were indeed debut collections ñ a couple of young Queenslanders whose poetry, even he could see from the over-sized testimonials, “sizzled” with tropical heat, “redolent of peanuts and bananas Ö”, making at least one of them “amongst the five or seven best poets of her still-emerging generation Ö” ñ but as for Porter’s best-of and Murray’s so-called first book, well, you know the drill.

“Ma’am, I’m saddened to inform you that your possession of not one but four Dan Brown novels leaves me with no choice but to detain you under the provisions of the Air Safety (Poetry Reclamation) Act 2016. Would you please remove your overcoat? I have reason to suspect that you may be hiding more embargoed items there.”

“Oh all right,” the woman muttered, digging out a thick book that claimed to explain, even better than Brown could, the perverse sexual habits of Jesus and his disciples.

“And the ñ”

“Okay, okay!”

Clint Bo Dean snickered with glee as the woman pulled out first a Harry Potter omnibus and then a battered Michael Crichton.

“This way, ma’am.”

Before Bo Dean could caution the woman further, however, she kicked him in his left leg and then somehow managed to pull a large hard-cover book from under her blouse. The book, a barely disguised copy of The Thorn Birds, suddenly exploded in her hands, ripping her torso from the rest of her body, and turning what was left of her once-proud face into mincemeat.