Ben Rice - Pobby and Dingan

The two problems seemed to go together somehow.

So this is what I did. The next day I went around town calling in at the shops and telling people why Kellyanne was sick. I went to The Wild Dingo, and even to The Digger’s Rest, where the toughest miners drink. I said, “Howdy, I’m Ashmol Williamson, and I’ve come to tell you my dad’s no ratter and my sister’s sick cos she’s lost her imaginary friends.” Well, there was a silence and then one of those miners came up to me, grabbed my collar and held me up by it, so that my feet came off the ground. He pulled me so close I could smell his stinking breath and said: “Listen here, kid. You go back and tell your daddy, if he ever shows his face in here again he’s gonna be the imaginary one. Understand? Imaginary! Geddit? Dead!” Well, I was just about to shit myself when a bunch of other miners came over and said to the bloke, “Put the kid down, mate. Rex Williamson is a friend of mine and those kids of his are good kids.” Well, this bastard threw me on the floor and said, “You wanna watch who your friends are!” to the men, and then walked out. The group of miners picked me up, brushed me down and asked if I was okay. I told them yes, but I was a little bit worried about my sister Kellyanne, because she was really sick and might get taken away to hospital, and how I was gonna try and lick clean my dad’s name until it shone red on black.

I had a busy day, all rightee. I went to the Bowling Club to tell the pokie players and also to the Wallangalla Motel, where there was some line-dancing practice going on. You should of seen me. I tried to go up to people on the dance floor and get them to stop dancing and listen, but they were too busy doing their moves to the music and I kept getting caught up between people’s arms. In the end I just walked up to the bloke with the tape decks and grabbed the microphone and shouted: “Ladies and gents! Sorry to interrupt your dancing, but my name’s Ashmol Williamson, and my sister is sick and we need to help her find her imaginary friends tomorrow!” There was this nasty high-pitched screech from the microphone, like it didn’t exactly enjoy what I’d said, and then everyone, about fifty people in all, stopped dancing and turned around and looked at me all at once. There was a silence and then I heard people mutter my dad’s name and whisper the word “ratter” to each other, and some of them frowned at me, and I knew all of a sudden what it feels like to be a mosquito. Well, I coughed into the microphone and explained in a shaky voice about my sister and Pobby and Dingan and how my dad got into trouble on Old Sid’s claim. And I told them how Pobby and Dingan had liked nothing better than line-dancing, and that unless we found them they might never be able to do it ever again. And then I suddenly ran out of things to say and felt a bit weird with all those lines of people looking at me, so I just put down the microphone and ran out and got back on my Chopper and pedalled off wobbly-legged.

I went almost everybloodywhere. I went to the Automobile Graveyard and spoke to Ronnie, who recognized me from the time he gave me the cool door off the Dodge. I went out to the camps at Old Chum and Vertical Bill’s and the Two Mile. And some people whispered to each other about Dad and some didn’t. And some folks thought I was nuts. And some were nuts themselves anyway so it didn’t make no difference. I even went out and told the tourists out at the Big Opal. They patted me on the head and smiled and whispered to each other in funny languages. One big American man filmed me with his video camera and told me to say something cute into it so he could show his friends back home. But when it came to the crunch I couldn’t say anything and I didn’t feel too much like smiling. So I showed him my James Blond 007 impression, where I turn sharp and fire a gun like on the video that my friend Brent’s parents gave him after they struck opal out at the Three Mile. And I told this tourist how when I grew up I might have a James Blond gun and everything. But then I realized I was wasting time and Kellyanne was sick, and my dad was being called a ratter, and these tourists wouldn’t really give a shit, but.

I went out to the town hall, where some of the black kids were practising a traditional Korobo-something dance with their teacher in funny outfits and didgeridoos and drums. I stood there for a while and watched them and had a good laugh at how dumb they looked. And then one of them started running straight at me with a spear and told me he was going to shove it up my ass unless I dooried right off out of the hall. But the teacher stopped him and honked on her didgeridoo and told him to shut up and get back to doing his hunting dance. But before they started the dance I managed to squeeze in a few words about how sick Kellyanne was, and I also asked them if maybe they could do a dance to conjure up Pobby and Dingan some time tomorrow. And the teacher said that they would certainly think about it if they had time, and then she started going off on one about how her ancestors believed opals were dangerous and stuffed full of evil spirits, and how maybe my family was paying the price for worshipping it and drilling horrible holes in the beautiful aboriginal land.

Well, I’d had enough of hearing this goddamned hooey, as my dad called it, and so I shot off and cycled out on the dirt roads around about a couple of hundred more camps on my rusty old Chopper bike telling people about Kellyanne and how she was ill because of losing her imaginary friends. It was a hot day, and hard work, and so I made sure I was tanked up with Mello Yello to stop my mouth getting dry from all that explaining I was doing. When I told people what had happened to my sis, some of them looked at me like I was a total fruit loop. But a lot of them already knew about Pobby and Dingan, because they had kids who went to the same school as Kellyanne, out at Walgett, and they had seen her talking to them on the old school bus. One older girl out at the caravan park came up to me and said: “Are you Kellyanne Williamson’s brother? My mum says you Williamsons are stupid people and your dad’s a drunk ratter and so you better go away or I’ll punch you the way I punched your sister that time at the Bore Baths.” I gave her the finger and pedalled off fast cos she was too big for me. But she called after me: “The only friends you Williamsons have are imaginary ones! Just you remember that, Ashmol Williamson!”

But some people were real nice about it. On one of the camps a woman gave me a Mello Yello and a cake and asked me how my mum was doing at the supermarket. She said: “The sooner they get your pretty little sister to hospital the better.” I answered: “Yup. But it’s more complicated than that, Mrs. Wallace. See, Kellyanne’s sick-with-worry sick; she ain’t hospital-sick sick.” I also met this kid who knew as much about Pobby and Dingan as I did. He said he didn’t like Kellyanne too much but he thought Pobby and Dingan were all right. He said he had a much better imaginary friend than Kellyanne. It was a giant green ninja platypus called Eric. He didn’t talk to it, but.

One twinkly and crazy old-timer with a parrot took me into the bust-up old tram where he lived and told me he had heard Kellyanne talking to Pobby and Dingan once when she was at the town goat races. She had been standing with three lollies on Morilla Street. This old miner said he believed that Pobby and Dingan really existed and he would look out for them as carefully as he could when he was walking around town. He would also check in at Steve’s Kebabs to see if they’d stopped by for a feed, and he would write a poem called “Come Home, My Transparent Ones!” and hand it around his bush-poet mates. This old codger didn’t seem to understand that I just wanted him to pretend to be looking for Pobby and Dingan. But there you go.