Postcard from Cue

“What did the Chinese couple call their baby when it came out black?” asks the muffled Kiwi as the rod churns down.

“Dunno”, I shout, showing a pair of sieves to the fluffy sky.

“Sum Ting Wong.”

“Oh! Mmmm.”

There is relative silence. Another clay donkey-dick bucks through the sample hose and jams in the cyclone.

“I hate Asians”, he finally resolves, thoughtful.

“Yeah”, I say, ambiguous. I don’t hate Asians. I hate everybody.

The slower the drilling, the steadier the jokes – mostly lifted from Picture – begin to flow. These transported clays – a hundred or a hundred and twenty metres thick, vertical – are decaying us all. The less we do, the greater our lethargy. Lunch is earlier, rods are heavier, cable ties defeat my feeble hands. We are sweaty and restless.

And the flies. My Lord, the flies. I’d never worn a net before. One might as wear a tall pink cone, I’d thought, with ‘poofter’ painted on the vertical. P-O-O-F-T-E-R. Now, this fine mesh hood is my sanctuary and my prison. It keeps the flies out, or in, but denies me the ability to eat, drink, blow and spit with my usual abandon. Worse than that: together with the tinted safety glasses, it denies me pure light, that sensory pleasure so necessary for the serious geologist. And what of the earplugs, the broad brim, the hardhat, the sunscreen? A sensory holocaust! What chance of oneness with the environment, of melting into the earth and becoming the rock?

Enough! I declare. Enough of this half or three-quarter living! Could the unblunted reality be so devilish that, if naked, I’d wither before it? Surely not, or possibly so – I don’t care. A rod on the cranium instead of this filtered fog? Yes sir, topple one down! A hundred decibel blast of mist into my earhole? Line me up nice-and-proper! And for God’s sake man, give me a little light exfoliation from the sample hose while you’re up!

I retreat to an acacia, which sprays up, grey-green, as if from a puncture in the orange sand. There are two plant species in the Murchison: small acacias and slightly bigger acacias. Billions of bulbous fountains dispensing soul sedative, and not a decent gum to be seen. I collapse cross-legged under the shrub’s canopy and lazily drag all the protections from my head, casting them into the dirt. My forearms go to my knees and the hum of the rig sends me slumping forward to equilibrium.

At first, my focus jumps from fly to fly as they land or move or depart. The senior flies – the kings and queens – occupy the eyes, nostrils and ears, while the peasants work the beard and limbs. Soon, my mind can’t compute the movements of the fifty or a hundred or two hundred sets of legs and I enter a period of roaring, buzzing overload. I grimace and blink throughout, until ten minutes later, suddenly, I am Fly Buddha.

A million tiny masseurs and acupuncturists soften my overworked body. Then I am cool and drifting and tickled by sea-grass. My giggling grin is soon exploited. I am their greasy Gulliver, their crusty Kurtz. I am their temple of worship, with physical and spiritual sustenance leaking from every pore. Drink up, little sweat miners! The boom rolls on!

The driller taps me on the shoulder and thrusts a piece of rock at me. It’s bedrock. He shakes his head and walks away. I look past the chip in my hand and see a seething black crust over a cut on my calf. High-grade nutrient!

Sadly, I am no longer Fly Buddha. No sir. Now I am the Ass Phallanthropist! Yes, the Documenteur of Donkey Dicks! Fifty or eighty metre beds of pure schlongs, todgers, bell-ends, pork-swords and womb-brooms! Goodness me, what kind of mega-tooled fauna roamed this place in the Tertiary? What a menagerie of man-meat!

The rig rolls away, and I resolve to stop reading Picture. Burps and growls echo from the finished hole. I wander over and peer down into the darkness.

“Another one of them gold-eatin’ dragons”, I conclude, dropping the plastic cone in and jamming it down, nice and tight.