The Bat(20)

They slowly cruised down the street as somnambulist eyes followed them.

‘This is great. I didn’t think places like this existed any more. You could just die laughing.’

‘Why?’ Andrew asked.

‘Don’t you think it’s funny?’

‘Funny? I can see it’s easy to laugh at these dreamers nowadays. I can see that the new generation thinks the flower-power lot were a bunch of potheads with nothing else to do except play guitars, read their poems and screw one another as the whim took them. I can see that the organisers of Woodstock turn up for interviews wearing ties and talk with amusement about the ideas of those times, which obviously seem very naive to them now. But I can also see that the world would have been a very different place without the ideals that generation stood for. Slogans like peace and love may be clichés now, but back then we meant it. With all our hearts.’

‘Aren’t you a bit old to have been a hippy, Andrew?’

‘Yes. I was old. I was a veteran hippy, a slyboots,’ Andrew grinned. ‘Many a young girl received her first introduction into the intricate mysteries of lovemaking with Uncle Andrew.’

Harry patted him on the shoulder. ‘I thought you were just talking about idealism, you old goat.’

‘Of course. This was idealism,’ Andrew said with indignation. ‘I couldn’t leave these fragile flower buds to some awkward, pimply teenager and risk the girl being traumatised for the rest of the seventies.’

Andrew glanced out of the car window and chuckled. A man with long hair, a beard and a tunic was sitting on a bench and making the peace sign with two raised fingers. A placard with a drawing of an old, yellow VW camper announced ‘The Marijuana Museum’. Beneath, in smaller letters: ‘Admission: one dollar. If you can’t pay, come in anyway.’

‘This is Nimbin’s dope museum,’ Andrew explained. ‘It’s mostly crap, but I seem to remember they have some interesting photos of the Mexico trips with Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac and the other pioneers when they were experimenting with consciousness-expanding drugs.’

‘When LSD wasn’t dangerous?’

‘And sex was just healthy. Wonderful times, Harry Holy. You shoulda been there, man.’

They parked further up the main street and walked back. Harry took off his Ray-Bans and tried to look like a civilian. It was clearly a quiet day in Nimbin, and Harry and Andrew ran the gauntlet between the vendors. ‘Good grass! . . . Best grass in Australia, man . . . Grass from Papua New Guinea, mind-blowin’.’

‘Papua New Guinea,’ Andrew snorted. ‘Even here in the grass capital people walk around thinking grass is better if it comes from somewhere far enough away. Buy Australian, I say.’

A pregnant yet thin girl was sitting on a chair in front of the ‘museum’ and waved to them. She could have been anything from twenty to forty and was wearing a loose, vivid skirt and a buttoned-up blouse, making her stomach stand out with the skin stretched like a drum. There was something vaguely familiar about her, Harry thought. And from the size of her pupils Harry was able to conclude there had been something more stimulating than marijuana on her breakfast menu that day.

‘Looking for something else?’ she asked. She had observed that they hadn’t shown any interest in buying marijuana.

‘No—’ Harry started to say.

‘Acid. You want LSD, don’t you.’ She leaned forward and spoke with urgency and passion.

‘No, we don’t want any acid,’ Andrew said in a low, firm voice. ‘We’re looking for something else. Understand?’

She sat gazing at them. Andrew made a move to go on, but then she jumped up, apparently unaffected by the large stomach, and took his arm. ‘OK, but we can’t do that here. You’ll have to meet me in the pub over there in ten minutes.’

Andrew nodded, and she turned and hurried down the street with her large bump, a small puppy running at her heels.

‘I know what you’re thinking, Harry,’ Andrew said, lighting up a cigar. ‘It wasn’t nice to trick Mother Kindheart into believing we would buy some heroin. The police station’s a hundred metres up the street and we could find what we need on Evans White there. But I have a hunch this’ll be quicker. Let’s go and have a beer and see what happens.’

Half an hour later Mother Kindheart entered the near-empty pub with a man who seemed at least as hunted as she was. He resembled the Klaus Kinski version of Count Dracula: pale, lean, dressed in black with dark bags under his eyes.

‘There you go,’ Andrew whispered. ‘You can hardly accuse him of not testing the stuff he sells.’