ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
It might only be Thursday but the Silly Season is still pumping here on the fringe of the Simpson Desert and to celebrate the lovely weather today, the big wigs down at Claypoonz Ellimint & Hecksdet decided to give their entire staff a half-day.
While some went for a light jog and others to their respective mixed Austag commitments, most went down to the many pubs that riddle our town’s legal district like growths inside a 12-year-old French Bulldog.
One of those revellers was Lucy Spearman, who does something with a computer inside a law firm in exchange for money to spend on things she doesn’t really need.
She told our reporter that she took one look around The Gelded Seahorse’s public bar where she ended up with all the other passively-aggressive and pathetically-competitive robots from her capital markets team and decided to give her boyfriend a ring.
Nobody she saw was anyone she really wanted to drink with.
But she knew she was taking a risk. Her boyfriend, Joose Brown, is a local Uber driver and might not risk his lively hood by picking up the phone to talk.
“He doesn’t believe in hands-free, when the phone rings, he picks it up and holds it against his ear. Even when he’s driving,” she told our reporter this afternoon down at the Gelded Seahorse.
“Says he doesn’t want the Chinese government listening to his conversations. I don’t pry because I think it’s weird and I… yeah. Anyway,”
“I phoned him just before and told him that Tom was here. He and Tom really hit it off at the Christmas Party at the end of last year. They’re mates.”
A quarter of an hour later, our reporter ran into Joose smoking a cigarette out the front.
He was also enjoying a pint of iced Bulmers.
It was there that he was able to confirm to our reporter that he had and continues to have no idea who Tom is – even after shaking his hand.
“Never seen the bloke in my life,” he said.
Joose then spat a dart of sugary slurry out through the gap between his two front teeth.
“My missus always stitches me up like this. I could be out there working, inside I’m stuck in this pub talking to strangers and trying my hardest not to play Buckhunter. She says it embarrasses her when I play Buckhunter because it’s in the middle of the pub and it gets me really worked up and sometimes I just fucking lose my temper and say things I don’t mean to the bucks,” he said.
Our reporter just nodded and let Joose continue.
And he did.
More to come.
