Wasted

I’m disgusted. I’m a night cabbie, and for the past year or two, ever since the last Commonwealth election, I’ve been driving home public servants, drunk and exhausted. I pick them up from Parliament, from government offices, from hotels. Long after midnight.

Red van, red tape

Some burgers rely on quantity for their value. Or the variety of ingredients. Much as I like pineapple, bacon, cheese, pickles, tomato and egg piled high for a huge calorie fix, my Brodburger was exactly right on the quantity and variety. Not too heavy, not too unwieldy.

Just right. The perfect mix of homemade ingredients, freshly prepared and simply presented. I was licking the last juices from my happy fingers when my next radio job came in, and I was on the road again.

26. Boomgate

BookCrossing. Giving away perfectly good books to strangers. Quint couldn’t understand it at all, but Ann took a strange amount of fun from the disease, often closing the shop for weeks at a time while she travelled to conventions where fellow-sufferers gathered to discuss their symptoms.

“Not my cup of tea, Ann. You tried to sign me up, remember?”

“You either get it or you don’t.”

Quint nodded. “Like a cold.”

“I caught it off Ann,” Harley said. “Anyway, I was on the airport rank yesterday, and I had a couple of spare seconds, so I whipped out and released a book against one of the pillars. This book.”

1. On the level

“That’s the new ASIO building going up,” the driver said, seeing Quint’s blank face. “Australian Secret Intelligence Organisation. The spy mob. Going to be a huge building. Five stories high.”
“Five stories?” Quint tried to imagine an office block stretching along Constitution Avenue, rising above the oak trees.
“Of course, those five stories will be underground. Security, you see. Just a grassy knoll on top.”