Author: dean

People who play video games to unwind may be better off watching a horror film on television instead, say research scientists of Birmingham University.

I couldn’t agree more. The terrible tempers, tantrums and twitchings of young people playing video games have indeed made me turn with a screech of relief to the friendly devilry in Transylvania, to homespun mad scientists while even the mummy’s curse seems music after that other one who is always screaming, “Leave that game and do your homework.”

I prefer a bit of decent terror to a bunch of little horrors any day.

I have more rapport with the person who is normal and nice and suddenly changes to something revolting.

Take Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; one moment the suave surgeon and the next a raving madman. And all because he’s confused about medical benefits!

Then there is the creature from the nine-kilometre swamp, a thing covered with weeds, dripping moisture and exuding the miasma of bog and brush. That’s what happens to you when you have a temperamental septic tank.

I must also confess to a pas sing interest in Wolf Man. Come full moon he is growing hair all over his face and howling for girls. He reminds me so much of the young blokes in my office.

Certainly horror is family entertainment.

Recently I had been watching Dracula when my wife entered.

I held her close, took a bite out of her neck and said, “My, that’s a good year.”

Later, however, I went as pale as your common apparition. I picked up my wallet to find that it had been sucked dry.

I suppose that fear of the unknown is a part of all of us. We are tribal and primitive if only we scratch the surface.

And scratch the surface of the best furniture and you’ll find how tribal and primitive some of us are.

Needless to say, Frankenstein has always been admired at our place… the staring eyes, the shuffling gait, the great clumsy hands, the doors falling off their hinges, shelves splintering to matchwood, chairs crushed to a pulp, people screaming.

My wife says: “He reminds me so much of your handyman jobs in the house.”

Torture films often get to me, the sheer bestiality of banquet scenes, with the starving victim on the rack and crushing his diet biscuits with his clammy hands.

But, as my neighbour, remarked, who wants horror films when you can get the water rates, the power, the telephone bill and a letter saying your relatives are coming, all in the same mail?

Sometimes terror comes softly in sweet disguises, with long, dark, drooping lashes, rosy lips and unfathomable eyes like the pretty tellers in my bank when they tell me I’m overdrawn.

There are times too, when even my wife makes me un easy. Looking at her covertly I see a distinct resemblance to those voodoo ladies who stick pins in their victims. The thought came to me when she was sewing buttons on the shirt I was still wearing.

One child, watching a horror film on our television, rushed down to tell us about the thing on the screen: “It seems on another planet, it’s huge, it rolls over everything in its way and it has rocks in its head. ”

There’s a lot of it about in our family!

 

Max Fatchen—rattles the family closet… and is aghast at what falls out

My country cousins, who are fairly expert at turning a furrow, are now learning to turn a phrase.

They are on the editorial committee of the local history book which the. district is producing as its Jubilee 150 project.

It’s one of a number of books that are being enthusiastically compiled and launched around the State, charting the lives and times of our rural communities. They are documents full of interest, folklore and a considerable amount of fun.

I have been made a consultant, a belated recognition that we urban scribblers have our uses apart from sensationalising sin and sex, misunderstanding the rural sector and leading hedonistic lives in our old dressing-gowns as we sprawl in front of the video player.

Certainly country people dig enthusiastically among the old days; among the industrial archaeology of primitive harvesters and bloody-minded ploughs; in a rich gallery of characters who ran post offices and local stores; the stock agents and auctioneers; the bank managers and travelling hawkers; the indefatigable women and the imperishable CWA.

Days of foundation-stone laying come to light; old pictures of bewhiskered dignitaries out in the windy, limestone country or in the sand and scrub of the mallee, patting the stone with a symbolic trowel with a background of traps and buggies and old cars and a foreground of girls with ribbons and boys in britches.

There are pictures of horse teams, drawn up in a proud line, the farmer posing on his seed drill, one hand on hip, the other holding the rope reins. Not too much technology, but that old dog sitting beside the drill was a damn sight smarter than a computer and he could fight like a threshing machine.

There are the old school pictures you find and my country cousins and their committee have found plenty.

The class of 26 at the little one-room primary school in the scrub. There they stand, the children of yesterday in long pinnies and short pants, the picture taken with everyone squinting into the sun.

The older folk of the district are called to identify the scholars and, as they look at the pictures, their eyes kindle at the memory of youth and old Wilf the Walloper, doyen of the cane—but he could teach arithmetic and make it stick and he declaimed poetry with a majesty and thunder that alarmed grade one.

Mind you, the editorial committee is well organised. The whole district is afire with literary zeal.

They are compiling a story for all seasons and situations; drought and rabbit plagues; football finals and tennis afternoons; work and sweat and tears and war; loves lost and loves remembered; houses that have crumbled into ruins and dreams with them; townships that have grown and prospered; district councillors who have suffered and served.

There’s a story of the local blacksmith’s shop with its vast bellows, its coke fuel and an enormous array of pincers, rasps, hammers and horseshoes, and cultivator shears. One can imagine the hiss as the hot horseshoes were plunged into water to cool and the ingenuity of the blacksmith in shaping a part for a harvester or a plough.

Or the accounts of country weddings, especially those in the evening when the light of the kerosene lamps in the church glistened on the tears of relatives while the kids gawked at a sister in bridal white as they wondered how a normally run-of-the-mill girl could be so transformed, even though she’d said she’d half kill them if they made a racket during the ceremony.

All these things are assessed by the editorial committee with the respectful consultant from the city making suggestions and could he have another cup of tea?

Someone has an account of a Sunday school picnic at the beach supplied from some family record. How they went in horse-drawn sheep wagons while sitting on bags of chaff and how at lunch under the tarpaulins held up by pitchfork handles, the children enthusiastically sang grace to the consternation of the parson:

Be present at our table, Lord.
Be here and everywhere adored,
These creatures bless
And grant that we
May feast on sausage rolls for tea.

Well, I’m sure we’ll have a good history before we’re finished. Anyone for sausage rolls?

Max Fatchen

(Fatchen’s view)

 

It is a beautiful transformation; a scenery of greenery.

I am speaking of the office plants, those succulent and sappy soothers of our dizzy day.

There have been varying methods of keeping workers happy. Piped music which helps you to face the other kind. Lunchtime jogging to calcify your calves.

At one stage we went through the fish tank and golden carp stage, the mini-aquarium sprightly with oxygen bubbles, shining shells and drowned figurines.

Often I sat there fishing for a few compliments but with no luck except for a couple of nibbles from a secretary and a bite from the boss.

So now it’s the sylvan scenario, the wild cry of the office birds through the shrubbery. One can sit lunching indoors among the greenery and it’s one hell of a place for garden salad.

Every day there seems a new triffid ogling us from its pot. I began with a miniature palm tree but I got sick of people leering at me and saying “Hullo, old sweaty palms.”

My particular pet at present is a slightly sinister climbing plant that has been hanging around my desk in a most suspicious manner.

“It will grow on you,” said the chief. And frankly that’s what I’m afraid of.

I can’t define its sex exactly but when I hissed at it, “You give me the creeps, Virginia,” it trembled with excitement and for a moment we held tendrils.

Certainly there are problems with all this foliage. Yesterday the office boy had to summon me. It took him an hour to cut his way to my desk.

The chief, mind you, is satisfied with his pot plant. It’s a sort of large bush and he’s constantly beating around it.

Visitors find it all a bit perplexing. People were being shown over the office and naturally I was pointed out to them.

“That’s Max and his vegetation. Both of them are pretty dense.”

The young woman at the next desk has pronounced her love for her Monstera Deliciosa. As they get to know each other better she may also learn how to pronounce Monstera Deliciosa.

One secretary was so upset this week when they removed her pet plant. I’ve never seen such tender leaves-taking.

Still, I hardened my heart, “Keep out of my woods, babe,” I hissed to her. She’s now had to take pot luck with an aspidistra.

Already our office jungle is attracting outside interest. For instance, naturalists are concealing themselves in the undergrowth around our water cooler to watch us coming down to drink.

One female person brought a man-eating plant and placed it on her desk. Well, it’s certainly among friends.

Our business people report that it has been a year of expansion, a year of real growth. You can say that again. I’m getting tired of people appearing out of the bushes and presuming, I’m Dr Livingstone.

Meanwhile it’s business as usual and green grow the rushes, oh.

And, if you can’t come into the garden, Maud, I’ll see you down at the plant!

 

Max Fatchen

British bed manufacturers say that a sagging, flagging mattress could be the answer to marital problems. A new one could be like a “second honeymoon.”

Only this morning my wife complained about a great lump on the mattress.

It took her and the rest of the family to remove me.

Yet the mattress problem is one you need to sleep on. I always test mattresses in motels, for instance, until the people on the floor below complain and the management sends in a bouncer.

We’ve had a variety of mattresses. There was the Slope and Slide with a hollow in the middle; the Matterhorn where you spent all night climbing back into bed and the Sleepy Hollow where you got in a rut and stayed there.

There was the mattress that put you all on edge and was the earliest example of brinkmanship. We also had one called Dick Whittington which we had to turn and turn again.

Some people beat their mattresses but a mattress won’t take this lying down. Mattresses can be stubborn and hard to handle. Ever tried shifting them? Oh, certainly some have little handles but not our mattresses. They twist and turn and we even had a mattress that kangaroo-hopped down the passage and sprang on a visitor.

Mind you, it depends on the kind of mattress you. choose. I like those huge, opulent mattresses full of suppressed energy. I leapt on one in a store and flew through two departments. They’d never seen such a big overhead.

But certainly we should take mattresses seriously. Sleep knits up the ravelled sleeve of care, Shakespeare says, and nightly ravelry may be just the thing, begging your pardon for the pun, Will.

Mattresses are important with guests. If the guest looks like settling in for a long stay we usually give him Lumpy Lena which soon gets his back up.

One of my friends is terribly keen about his waterbed and describes his wife as a real dreamboat although he was worried when he woke up one morning and found a notice pinned to him Not wanted on the voyage.

We had a feather mattress once but we had to get rid of it. For one thing my wife began cackling in her sleep and at dawn I woke up, leapt on the bedrail and started to crow.

Yet some people can sleep anywhere. And mat tresses can sometimes be too comfortable; so sensuous that you never want to get out of bed. Only last weekend I was in bed telling my wife all kinds of excuses why I should remain there; that my back was hurting again, that I thought I had a cold, that my headache was back. This is called a good lie-in.

I suppose we are creatures of comfort, longing for a quiet kip, opting for snore and peace when the tensions of the day are over.

Certainly mattresses can promote romance but, take, it from me, often they’re a bit of a yawn.

 

Max Fatchen

I’ve just read about a study of the effectiveness of music in public places and the way it aims to fill in the empty noise spaces.

I must here say that every noise space in our house is filled and that I’ll have to put you on the waiting list.

I’ll go further and say we have the best listening device in the country and, if you wish, I can introduce you to her.

Once we had long silences at the breakfast table but not any more.

Once I could say: “Give me a moment to think.”

But now only the stereotyped retort, “We haven’t got all day.

So it’s noises, noises and I must say she has a remarkable noise identification catalogue where every sound is on file and any acoustic outbreak beyond the norm is instantly investigated by the auditory computer with inlets on the right and left side of her head.

My wife (you surely have guessed by now) knows the squeak of mice, even separating the squeaks of mature and immature rodents. She can detect the scuttle of a fruit rat hurdling the rafters above the ceiling.

She can define the creak of specific furniture, especially the quick, indrawn twang of assorted springs accommodating Old Jumbo Bum.

She is instantly alerted by the stealthy passage of surreptitious slippers on carpets, she can interpret the creak of individual boards marking a nocturnal foray in the direction of the refrigerator and can tell you to the centimetre how far it has progressed.

She knows when the person will bark his shin on the sharp edge of the nest of tables with which she has slyly minefielded his flight path.

The resulting Who put the *&%$#@! things there? of course immediately fills the noise spaces to overflowing.

This naturally makes the victim fight noise with noise.

Suggestion. Why not drown the opening of the refrigerator door by flushing the toilet?

Good thinking, friend, unless, of course, the door opener has forgotten the basin of cold stewed quinces, poised like a boulder above an abyss and which falls in a red cascade of juice and fruit and a shattering sound upon his toes and gives him basin feet blues.

Even when the flushing technique works one has to scamper to reflush and then return tiptoeing to the refrigerator and, let’s face it, not all of us are built to stand on tiptoe.

There’s, for instance, the dousing of the refrigerator light with an old sock because the slightest rise or irregularity in the level of illumination is also noticed by the ever-alert house control.

This brings her down, rubbing her eyes and murmuring: “Seeing that you’re up you can make me a cup of tea and a sausage sandwich and don’t think I don’t know what you’ve been up to. Oh, and I put a 100-watt globe in the fridge and it lights up the room like daybreak.”

It does indeed.

I’ve tried to counter her fiendish hearing with headphones and a little tape player and her optical alertness by her wearing a fringe. Alas not all the lullabies in the world can lull her or Wagnerian chords shock her into insensible sleep.

So we have learnt to live without noise spaces.

Take it from me.

We’re all goners in this house—rats, mice and myself, we things that go munch in the night.

 

Max Fatchen

I’m always worried by people who are slaves to road maps; who go directly from A to B without the slightest diversion.

I’m a misreader of maps, a wanderer down tracks and along quiet roads and I appear suddenly in people’s drives and farmers private lanes, stuttering my apologies as people race to lock up their tow band daughters and to slam the dairy door.

I only half listen to directions.

My wife says, “Shouldn’t we have turned left at that road?”

Or “Darling, aren’t we on the road to Pinnaroo?”

How would I know? I’m only the driver. I’m perverse that way. I have been lost in all the best places. I have wandered into little puzzled towns. I have run out of petrol, kilometres from anywhere, and have waited beside the road for the inevitable farm utility with a couple of dogs hanging over the side with wind-brushed ears and showing their rural fangs at this suspicious fellow in the big old trousers who is beckoning from the culvert.

Sometimes getting directions in the country is likely to send one deeper into the bewildering hinterland so that one could easily finish at Booleroo Centre or Smithfield.

It’s because I never read sign- posts. I am always looking somewhere else. This is one way to enjoy the countryside.

People are always telling me to get lost and I try my best.

One finishes sometimes at little pubs under pepper trees, places with counter lunches with a homely touch; or at country stores where they’ll heat the pasties for you.

Certainly I’ve never had a sense of direction, I have always gone every which way. I have even been lost in Gawler.

One reason I don’t like bus tours is their obsessive organisation and impeccable geographical knowledge. Sticking to the schedule; cheerful enough in the bus with the merry driver and the people who have just won last week’s bingo. There is soothing music and you might even have the dreaded singsong if you’re under a chatty charter.

That’s why I’m an uncharted traveller, soothed by the breathalysed breeze as I pour tea from our old vacuum flask with its silvered interior and its cracked plastic cup that leaks down my lower lip.

I sit in my folding flesh in my folding chair while my wife sorts out the neat heaps of sandwiches and I look at them and think: Here’s a couple who’ve made their pile.

Road side lunch under trees with their branches set in a blue background of sky with a foreground of willy-wagtails chittering insect gossip

This quiet road is not on the map. It is no doubt the responsibility of some council and in the ward of some earnest councillor who worries about its surface in his budgetary dreams. It is an all-weather road but only just. It has soft edges and a bumpy middle but peace lies on it and sleepy lizards absorb the last warm rays of autumn before winter has them sorting out their armoured underwear.

I find a roadside butterfly, a beautiful thing, orange with veined wings and there’s a grasshopper that leaps in a tiny frenzy of propulsion. What a wonderful way to escape your creditors?

Sun and shadow, bird and branch and one last tomato sandwich with thee beneath the bough.

More tea, dear? It’s restful here.

You’re dribbling again. It’s the plastic cup, dear.

Put a Band-aid on it, my love.

How quietly the day lazes away across the paddocks to the ranges leaning against the afternoon.

Old cows with long-service udders come to eye us and I thank them for their product as I add a little to my tea.

My wife is reading aloud from her book, some phrase she wants me to remember by someone I want only to forget.

The world will take us back soon enough. For I can hear the main road humming with ruthless energy.

“Wipe your chin,” says my wife.

I wipe it slowly before the curious cows and wish them well.

We arrive home eventually for finally I have remembered the way.

So what are you doing at the weekend? Playing some highly organised bowls match or going to eight-races at Morphettville or hauling your highly organised trailerboat to the crowded ramps.

Why not come and lose yourself with me? Miss a few turnings and then dream as we eat our tomato sandwiches. Why, you may even drink from the incredible cracked plastic cup by the road with soft edges where butterflies blaze and sleepy lizards hibernate, out of reach of Ronald Reagan, the Australian Swimming Union and even poor Dr Cornwall.

 

Max Fatchen

A computer will be able to diagnose our medical condition by using a single hair, so I read.

This has rather upset me. I enjoy the interrogation and examination at the doctor’s; the reporting to the nice, understanding receptionist who listens to my symptoms, how it came on me suddenly and I’m not sure where I caught it but there is a lot of it about whatever it is and I’m not as young as I used to be and I suppose one must expect even the best engines to run down. Wink, wink.

She smiles at me over my file, that dossier of my decay, which is in a cute cardboard folder as secretive as the CIA.

And I take it to my doctor like a child presenting his report card and he looks at it and looks at me and looks back again and says how do I feel. I tell him how it came on me suddenly and I’m not sure where I caught it but there is a lot of it about.

For one thing, this is my way of getting the most out of my medical benefits. So I usually go along with my main malady but as the doctor examines me I throw in two or three other symptoms to make it interesting and informative.

No, I haven’t lost weight. Yes it does hurt a little there, no, there, wait it’s back there. Breathe in deeply. The doctor breathes in deeply, too.

And all the time I’m saying I’m not as young as I was and there is a lot of it at the office and he smiles wanly and he be gins writing in my folder and I start to wriggle my chair around so I can see.

Then he takes my blood pressure, that tightening of the arm as he pumps me up like an old tyre and all the while keeps the indicators hidden from me.

How high is it doctor? Well, it’s not a danger to aerial navigation but it would be better for all of us if I watched my diet and I say I never take my eyes off it.

Oh, there’s something else, doctor, just down here. Oh, he says, and puts me on the table in the surgery and I close my eyes while he presses here and there and I think what a specimen I am; Adonis run to fat; Apollo gone pudgy.

But I am really giving my medical benefits a shake now.

Temperate at meals

He finally hands me my file. Come back in a fortnight. Come back and we’ll go over it all again, he says. Try to be temperate. No returns at meals. I turn my big, slow eyes on him like an old dog, wise in the way of bones. Next please.

I return my file to the kind receptionist and I lean on the counter for a few moments saying that I don’t think I’m as bad as the last time and she’ll say discreetly she thinks I’m no worse and, if anything, I’ve lost a little.

Then I go off humming to myself, taking out my medical benefits card and sneering at it a little.

But now comes this scheme, diagnosis by computer. Surrender a hair and it’s all there.

The key is in your locks.

I can tell you this; no hair of mine is suffering a pate worse than death. I can see it now. The cold impersonal computer wrenching and examining. The final indignity.

Fatchen’s last strand.

There I’ll be in the wait ing room. “We’re doing your hair now, Fatchen.

The man in the next seat is restive, too. He has just come from the vet’s with the hair of the dog…

I ask questions about my hair but they’re brushed aside. Finally the computer doctor appears.

He places a hand on my shoulder: “We did our best. You know how it is: hair today and gone tomorrow.”

But as I leave I do gain a little comfort from the sign they hang on the door.

“Computer closed due to dandruff.”

 

Max Fatchen

The current debate about films too horrific for young eyes and the ensuing censorship wrangles takes me back to the movie days when, the most daring cinematic ploy was the occasional glimpse of Alice Faye’s knee or later, the long, lissom legs of Betty Grable.

But the most dreaded occurrence at the country cinema where I cut my sharp little teeth on popcorn rather than porn, was not a young Welshman keeping a head in a suitcase under the bed or old ladies lacing the elderberry wine with arsenic, but that frenetic occasion, the forerunner of soccer riots and street battles—The Interval.

Most of us went to movies so that we could go out during the interval and shoulder the shins of the swells from the dress circle.

We were the Front Stalls Kids, the chewing-gum under-the-seat stickers, the whistlers during the decorous love scenes, the roaring urgers of Tarzan on his creeper, Tom Mix on his horse. We were the rollers of spherical sweets that, if well delivered, could marble their way the length of the theatre.

But it was interval time where we shone in the ice cream crush and the popcorn pandemonium. We got to know, almost to a split second, when the first film would end.

As they took each other in their discreet arms or the villain politely coughed his last in a modestly gut-clutching finale on the streets of Laredo, we were on the edge of our seats ready to burn up the red carpet of the aisle, as we headed for the licorice strap Shangri-la of the sweets counter.

As the final music swelled we were off in a screaming bedlam that would make a rolling start at a grand prix look like a push-off of go-carts.

It was at the foot of the stairway of the circle that we really collided with the patricians the dentists, doctors, farmers, butchers, bakers and retailers and the few stuck-up kids who frequented the lavendar atmosphere of the reserved seats.

From our area heavy with the smell of disinfectant because they tried their best to fumigate us kids, we beat over the local aristocrats like a swarm of locusts and even the duty fireman, standing resolutely in navy blue and red with brass buttons, fingered his axe irresolutely.

The usherettes flattened themselves to the walls while the women at the counter had already flung up a barricade of glasses of orange and lemon and parapets of popcorn.

If some of the older patrons had got in early I usually went for their legs with what I called the juvenile squirm, forcing my way low and lethal past vulnerable kneecaps and pinching the Saturday night bulge of some matron in her twin-set, in order to get to the counter.

Adults, thinking they were set, and off guard, would suddenly find a sea of small Gorgon-like heads appear between them and the counter with a forest of waving hands.

But it was all revenue. The horror was to be endured, the toffeed trousers, the ice-creamed britches, the screech of a matron sitting on chewing gum and finding it adhering to her in an ever-stretching elastic cable. Then the recall bell sounded and the frenzy went into reverse. It was remarkable what you could carry in full flight three licorice straps, a bag of puffballs, an ice. cream cone, a paper cup of lemon drink, a bag of jelly babies, a packet of chips.

And you could still knock a full-grown man out of his stride or send some woman cowering and slopping her orange, as you hurtled back to your front row seat just as the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion was showing his dirty old teeth or that Paramount mountain ringed itself with frosty stars or the 20th-Century Fox fanfare with searchlights came up as the light dimmed and the late kids dark-footed for their seats.

Intervals tended to exhaust me. I trained for them all the week but that concentrated 15 minutes of elbowing and thugging my way to the confectionary counter and back brought a limpness to my young limbs and my coconutted fingers shook as I tore open a packet of jubes.

Of course the manager had the usual complaints about the kids?

Shouldn’t they be confined to matinees and surely it wasn’t good for them to see these older pictures of people kissing and even, maybe, Alice Faye’s knee?

But it was all because they were terrified of us at interval. And after all, we were revenue. We meant that the projectionist could have his Christmas bonus and the usherettes could have fresh torch batteries.

These sadístic days such a small eruption would pass unnoticed with everyone bashing each other in films and undressing even during the credits.

I still have a tendency to stampede out at intervals. I elbow my way to the confectionary stall but suddenly find I am almost alone.

People look at me curiously like you’d look at a dinosaur or a reliable Australian batsman. I’m an anachronism, old flotsam on the cinematic shore.

Certainly kids are eager and keen but the juvenile squirm has lost its panache. One feels so old hat taking a licorice strap to one’s cinema seat these days.

As for Alice Faye’s knee, it wouldn’t even get a second look!

 

Max ‘terror of the aisle’ Fatchen