Imaginary Foe by Shannon Leahy Read Free Book Online Page B

farms. There are crops and pastures, dairy farms, livestock farms and rows and rows of fruit and vegetables. I like to ride my bike around this area. Sometimes, I stop off on the side of the road, and, for a laugh, try and strike up a conversation with a cow. The cow always behaves in the same way. It stands still and looks me right in the eye, as if it’s trying hard to understand what I’m saying. Maybe it’s thinking, ‘What are you looking at, stupid human? Cows don’t speak English!’ After a while, I get bored with this and ride off, but not before expressing my disappointment to the cow that I might as well be talking to a brick wall!
    Steve’s parents own a property in the hills, just off the road that winds its way up to the dam. They’re pretty cool. Although they’re over the hill – in their forties – they seem quite young at heart. They even take the time to talk to you as if you’re a person of substance and not just an annoying, shitty teenager. They also have good taste. Years ago, they decided to build their dream home up in the hills. It’s an awesome place. It vaguely reminds me of the house from The Amityville Horror . It’s made of stone, and the upstairs section features two windows that stare out like evil eyes. But Steve’s family is really nice and none of them seem to be falling apart or harbouring a deep desire to murder the others.
    The really awesome thing about living in a small town is that you get to explore all the magical little spots in the surrounding area. There are secret bike paths that lead to private swimming holes, dilapidated bridges that you can bravely or foolishly cross, footpaths that weave through the bush and open on to trout streams, and there are even abandoned hay sheds where you can take a girl for a bit of one-on-one. But in the main part of town, you could be anywhere in suburban Australia.
    Every Sunday, Steve, Jeremy, Mike and I have a jam in the shed on Steve’s property. The shed sits in a valley beneath the house. Routinely, as it happens, we smoke a bit of hooch. It helps us with our creative flow, or lack thereof. We have a dream to form the most kick-arse band in the universe. Steve plays the guitar and sings. Well, it’s something akin to singing, anyway. He sounds like Lou Reed on Valium. I play bass. One of Dad’s mates lent me his bass guitar that he hasn’t picked up in years. It’s the ugliest bass guitar in the world, a 1960s Yamaha that has no bottom horn. Its body is rounded where it rests on your lap, so it just slips off if you play it sitting down. You have no option but to play with a strap. To top it all off, it’s yellow. So it’s known as the ‘banana bass’. Jeremy flinches whenever I take it out of its case and he always says the same thing, every time, without fail: ‘I can’t believe how fucking ugly that thing is. It’s so fucking ugly !’
    Jeremy plays the drums. He owns a nasty cheap kit that knows no subtlety. Every hit of the snare makes us wince, which results in all of us turning up our amps. It gets pretty noisy in Steve’s shed. Mike plays the guitar. He’s got a genuine Fender Telecaster and Fender twin amp, which sound superb. He’s the only one of us who has saved his money and bought some decent gear.
    So far, we’ve written a total of three songs and they aren’t too bad, considering both the amount of pot we smoke and that we’re all self-taught. Our favourite song is called ‘Hollow Man’. It’s about most of Middleton’s male inhabitants. It has an eruptive chorus, during which we all scream in unison, ‘Hollow man, you’re gonna die someday! / You better start living before they start digging your grave!’
    We all sit around after rehearsal, talking shit.
    ‘Hey, Mike, did you tell them your idea for a band name?’
    ‘No, I didn’t.’
    ‘What is it? I bet it’s woeful.’ Jeremy is such a shit-stirrer.
    ‘Well, I really don’t care what you think, Jeremy. In fact, if you