Finder’s keepers

A rare foray into fiction.

I’m getting old, Bertie muttered to himself as he made his way up the incline. The sun was about to disappear behind the hills. He walked past the bush block on his left, puffing harder and harder. Captain, his dog, had disappeared into the bush to explore, as he always did when they reached this point on their daily walk.

Suddenly the dog started yapping excitedly. A tiger snake! was Bertie’s first thought, before he realised that no snake would be out and about in this cool autumn weather. A minute later Captain appeared, wagging his tail and dragging something along in his mouth.

Bertie patted the dog. “Good boy! What have you got here, then?” It was one of those canvas man bags that had lately come into fashion amongst the blokes in the village.

He unzipped the bag and peered in astonishment at the banknotes that had been crammed tightly into the bag. Furtively he looked around. There was no-one in sight. Without thinking twice and overcome with excitement at his good fortune he quickly tucked the bag under his coat, called the dog and turned around to walk back to his house around the corner at the bottom of the hill.

As soon as he was inside the house he locked the deadlock on the front door with a shaking hand, put the bag down on the kitchen table and unzipped it again. Inside the bag were a variety of notes, mainly fifties and twenties. I reckon there’d be a few thousand quid in there, he thought.

It wouldn’t be someone who had accidentally lost his bag along the way, Bertie mused. The bag had been thrown into the bushes, probably by a drug dealer who had been pursued by his competitors, or by the cops. He hid the bag behind the cookbooks on the kitchen shelf.

Bertie’s wife had succumbed to the Big C five years earlier. The house mortgage had been paid off, but he was struggling to get by on the pension and of necessity he lived a very Spartan life. Now this was about to change.

He went to bed early that night, but he couldn’t sleep. He kept seeing the banknotes in his mind’s eye. Captain must have sensed his excitement, because the dog was unusually restless.

Now I’ll be able to afford a holiday, Bertie thought. Maybe I’ll go on one of those cruises to New Zealand that they are always advertising on the telly. Or perhaps I’ll trade the old Holden in for a later model. He was getting more and more excited.

In the middle of the night, however, a sense of disquiet began to reach its tentacles out to him. What if someone had seen me walking along there and had told the cops? Or what if the drug dealers had discovered who had taken their money and came after me? He had seen reports on the news of drive-by shootings and cold-blooded gangland executions. What if the money had belonged to the bikies? A shiver ran down his spine.

He tossed and turned until it was almost daybreak, when at last he fell into a fitful slumber.

Bertie was woken by Captain’s loud barking. Someone was knocking loudly on the front door. For a mad moment he thought about sneaking out the back door and running away as fast as he could. With difficulty he pulled himself together and croaked “Hang on, I’ll be there in a minute!”

He struggled to put on his dressing gown, first sticking his arm into an inside out sleeve in his hurry. He went to the front door and opened it with trepidation.

“Good grief, Bertie, are you OK? It’s eleven o’clock already and you look like you’ve just got out of bed. Besides, you look like death warmed up.”

It was his neighbour, George, clutching Bertie’s chainsaw which he had borrowed earlier in the week.

“I’m alright thanks, mate. Just feeling a bit crook, s’all. The Bombay Twostep or something.”

After George had left, Bertie drew all the curtains and fretted his way restlessly through the day. He jumped at the slightest of sounds, fearing another knock on his door.

Eventually, when the daylight began to fade, he carefully peered outside. There was no-one around. He retrieved the bag from its hiding place and unzipped it. Now the banknotes appeared to him as though they were the carriers of some awful disease. He put on his coat, hid the bag under the coat and put Captain on a leash, before setting off up the hill at a forced leisurely pace. He felt as if unseen eyes were watching his every step.

When he got to the bush block he surreptitiously peered around, but there was not a soul in sight. He took the bag out from under his coat and hurled it as far as he could into the bushes, before tugging on the excited dog’s leash and heading home with shaking knees.

 

The opposite of handy

I will be the first to admit that I am not what you would call a handyman. Quite the opposite, in fact.

My lack of handyman skills was apparent from an early age. The only test that I ever failed at school was in woodwork, when we were given pictures of a variety of tools. We had to name these tools and write down what each one is used for. I couldn’t even tell the difference between a screwdriver and a chisel and any tool more complicated than those two baffled me completely.

Two years into high school every boy in our class had to do a woodwork project. I attempted to make a very basic small folding seat. It was a disaster. I just couldn’t do it. I was saved by the fact that our woodwork classroom had to be relocated near the end of the school year to another part of the school premises, around the time when our projects were due to be completed. Such was my desperation that I smuggled my attempt at the folding seat out in my school bag and dumped it into the bushes on the way home.

After we had moved into the new classroom, the teacher asked to see my project.

“I can’t find it, Sir. It must have been lost when they moved our stuff to the new classroom.”

In my first year at university I struggled to find my feet. I kept changing courses and was unable to find direction. Eventually one of my lecturers arranged for me to have an aptitude test.

A few days after completing the test I had to go and discuss the results with the person who had administered the test.

“Your aptitude test results are very mixed,” he told me. “I would recommend studies that would lead to a career in the diplomatic service.”

I was still digesting this, thinking how I could never become a diplomat in the service of the Apartheid regime, when he elaborated on the test results.

“Now, when it comes to mechanical skills, I have to tell you that you have achieved the lowest score of anyone that I have tested over the years. I suggest that you never try working with your hands. You’re an intelligent kid. Just stick to using your brains, but not your hands.”

Over the years my lack of handyman skills has become the stuff of legend, as becomes someone with as spectacular an aptitude test result as mine.

A few months ago I was standing outside a shop in Diamond Creek, talking to my mate Ken, when Digby from the local Mitre 10 hardware store came by.

“Hi Ken, How’re you going?” Digby said.

“I’m good,” said Ken. “This is my mate Tim.”

“Oh, I know Tim,” said Digby.

Ken was astounded. “Where do you know Tim from? Surely he’s never set foot in Mitre 10?”

“Oh yes, he does, sometimes. He comes in with his wife, that is. She buys the bits and pieces that she needs and if need be she asks me for advice. Tim just comes along for the company and to help her to carry stuff.”

Gill, my wife, contends that my inability to fix or make things is a matter of attitude, whereas I insist that it is a matter of aptitude. I have tried really hard, once or twice, like the time when we bought the wheelbarrow at KMart. It came in a cardboard box and we had to put it together ourselves.

“That’ll be simple,” Gill said. “Can you do it please?”

I asked her to find me the necessary tools and then I laboured for more than an hour, before realising that there were some components missing. “Bloody Kmart!” I raged. “You’d think that they would check that all the pieces are there before they sell the thing.”

Gill cocked her head to one side, inspected my handiwork and picked up the screwdriver and spanner. Within less than five minutes she had disassembled my construction completely and had reassembled it into a working wheelbarrow.

*        *        *

Sharing a house with someone else is challenging at the best of times, and so it is with us. I cannot stand background noise, but Gill likes to listen to John Pain (Faine) on talkback radio every morning and to that irritating Macka on a Sunday morning. She also likes the noise of the television in the background at times, whereas I love it when the house is dead quiet.

As if this is not challenging enough, Gill is a collector and a hoarder. I am a minimalist, but our house is full of stuff, small and big. Although I detest clutter, I cannot escape it in our house.

“If you cark it before me,” I told her grumpily one morning, raising my voice over John Faine’s, “I’m going to conduct proper interviews and have selection criteria for choosing my next wife. I’ll ask them if they like talkback radio, and whether they have ever collected anything.”

“Good idea!” she replied. Without missing a beat she added “And while you’re at it, ask them whether they can fix things.”