Ben Rice - Pobby and Dingan

And Kellyanne always sat in between Pobby and Dingan on the bus to Walgett.

And Dingan was a pacifist, because every time I stamped on her or punched her and said, “If Dingan is real why doesn’t she hit back?” Kellyanne would say, “Cos Dingan is a pacifist, stupid.”

And they was generous, because Kellyanne was always thanking them for being nice to her.

And they talked English or whistled to make themselves understood.

And you had to be a certain kind of person to hear them.

The preacher had stopped writing and was staring into space. “Thanks, Ashmol,” he said. “That’s plenty of information. Now, take care of your sister, and I’ll see you on Sunday.”

“Will Pobby and Dingan go to heaven or hell, vicar?” I asked before I went. I was sort of testing him out to see if he’d take Kellyanne’s friends seriously.

The preacher thought long and hard about this and said: “What do you think?”

“Heaven,” I said firmly, “so long as there’s Violet Crumbles there.”

“I think you’re right,” said the preacher and took another swig out of his green bottle. As I rode off on my Chopper he shouted: “I shall be praying for your father, Ashmol Williamson!”

“Do what you want, vicar!” I called back. “Just come up with the goods.”

I zoomed off down the road thinking about heaven. It was like the ballroom of an opal mine. Full of people with lamps on their heads. And everyone was singing Elvis Presley songs and gouging, and swinging picks.

Before I got home I stopped off at Humph’s Moozeum, which is a place full of amazing junk. The Moozeum is just down from the half-built castle which the bloke Domingo who I told you about was building single-handed out there in the middle of nowhere. That’s Lightning Ridge for you. People go all weird on you all the time, because it’s so hot, and they start building castles and shit.

The man who owns the Moozeum is called Humph and he has spent his whole life collecting weird things. Well, I liked to stop by and talk to him sometimes, and when I was sad it was a good place to go to cheer yourself up and get your mind on something else. There is a whole load of outhouses and old buses and cars and bits of mining machinery, and bush fridges, and there is a whole assortment of objects, old pictures, bones, bottles, books, sewing machines. There’s a car up a tree, and Humph even has the toes of one of his miner-friends pickled in a jar. He is getting some bloke’s leg pickled too. He has a chunk of fossilized Turkish Delight from Gallipoli, and a bottle of vodka which he says a band called the Rolling Stones gave him. He is a clever old bugger, Humph. You never know if what he is saying is true.

One of the sections of the Moozeum is underground, and that’s where I found old Humph sitting at the little bar he has in the corner. He was wearing a big floppy hat. “Ah, Ashmol,” he said. “Any news of Pobby and Dingan yet? Bit like looking for a needle in a haystack, I reckon.”

“Yeah, I found them,” I told him proudly. “They were both dead.”

Old Humph didn’t know whether to say “Good” or “That’s too bad” and so he just grunted and held up something to show me. I trundled over and stood looking. I was pretty impressed. It was a framed invitation to the funeral of Princess Diana. And the writing was done in really fancy silver lettering and there was a royal stamp on it and everything. “You got invited to the funeral of Princess Diana?” I asked with my eyes wide open.

“Did I hell!” said Humph, fairly splitting his sides with laughter. “This little bewdy I cut out of a magazine and stuck down on a piece of card! Don’t tell anyone, mind. The tourists love it.” That was Humph. He was a cunning old-timer who didn’t care too much about the truth of things so long as there was a good story in it, and most of the time he told people about his fakes anyway, so they could see how clever he’d been.

“Could you do me some invitations for Pobby and Dingan’s funeral?” I asked.

“Having a funeral, are you?”

I nodded. “I reckon Kellyanne won’t get better until we bury the dead bodies and show them some last respect.”

Humph nodded solemnly. “I wouldn’t have minded having their dead bodies in my Moozeum,” he said. “I haven’t got any dead imaginary friends in my Moozeum yet. ’Bout the only thing I haven’t got.”

“Maybe Kellyanne will let you get Pobby’s finger pickled and put in a jar,” I suggested.

“Maybe,” said Humph, taking a swig of Johnnie Walker. “So how many invitations do you want?”

“I want to invite everyone in Lightning Ridge.”

Humph nodded solemnly and scratched the top of his floppy hat.

“That makes eight thousand and fifty-three by my calculation,” I said.

The day of Dad’s trial arrived. I wasn’t allowed to go to the magistrate’s court, so I can’t say exactly what happened. I can only imagine it. But the fat and the thin of it was that, after he’d finished punishing someone for breaking and entering and when he had fined John the Gun and some other blokes for shooting too many roos, Judge McNulty made Dad stand up and tell the little jury about what he was doing out at Old Sid’s mine that evening.

Well, this time my dad didn’t make up a lost-cat story or make out he was just looking for his contact lenses. No way. He stood up straight and told them that he was out looking for Pobby and Dingan, the imaginary friends of his daughter Kellyanne Williamson, and that he was just checking to see if they’d wandered over onto Old Sid’s claim. And Mum said Judge McNulty looked all confused, like a jigsaw puzzle before you put it together, and that he asked Dad to describe their appearance. I flinched a bit as I imagined my old man stuttering and tongue-twistering as he tried to get to grips with that one. Well, my dad must have handled it pretty well, but, because then McNulty moved straight on and asked whether Dad was on any drugs, and whether Dad thought the imaginary friends really existed. And apparently Dad looked old McNulty and the jury and everybody dead straight with his opal eyes and said that at first he thought they didn’t exist, and then he wasn’t too sure about it, and now he was positive they did exist after all, because he was on trial for ratting because of them and he was a little angry with them for it too.

Judge McNulty rubbed his chin and scratched his head a lot. And then Old Sid, that whiskery bastard — as Mum called him — got up with a bandage over his nose and testified and called my father “mentally deranged” and lots of other things, including a “low-down piece of roo shit.” And some of Old Sid’s miner-mates backed him up and talked a lot about how much my dad would drink and how he was always interested in other people’s opal and where they had found it. And that confirmed he was a ratter as far as they could see. And then a policeman said how he saw Dad snotting Sid in the nose, only he didn’t say “snotting.”

Well, according to Mum, the judge fidgeted around and whispered things to people. And then McNulty looked at the little jury and told them that the whole question of Mr. Rex Williamson’s guilt depended on whether it should be considered a crime to hit someone on the nose when they have called you a ratter and also on whether the jury believed he was really out looking for his daughter’s imaginary friends that night. And he told the jury that meant they needed to work out for themselves how real they thought Pobby and Dingan were.

And Mum said you could see the jury mulling it over, and whispering the names Pobby and Dingan over plenty, and she reckoned that most of them were thinking, “Since half the town has been out looking for Pobby and Dingan, why couldn’t it just be possible that the father of Kellyanne Williamson was looking as well?” And then the jury heard from my dad that a funeral of Pobby and Dingan was taking place the next day, organized by his son Ashmol Williamson, and if the judge wanted he and the jury could come along and see what real people they had been. And then Old Sid and his lawyer complained that the funeral had been dreamt up to distract from Rex Williamson’s crime and that Pobby and Dingan were just invented on the spot as a sort of cover-up.