And Now For Something Completely Different… David Oxley!
David Oxley's life seems to be going from bad to worse. He's divorced, lives in a share house with the landlady from hell and his boring dead-end job is literally driving him around the bend…
Then, after a young girl goes missing in the dead of night and chance encounter in a rundown café early the next morning with a blond woman called Tracey, everything changes…
On the road, you never know who you're going to meet!
David Oxley has a pretty uneventful life really.
It isn't a bad life, all things considered. Things could most certainly have been a hell of a lot worse if David chose to think about it. And he did, often, but it never got him anywhere.
Dave's a healthy forty-year-old guy with a weakness for potato chips and a glass, or two, of red wine – a beer on a hot day. So, to combat such vices, David swims lengths at the public pool and works out at the gym a few days during the week – time permitting. On Monday nights, he goes into the city to learn how to dance – Gene Kelly style. None of that dirty dancing that Patrick Swayze made so popular in the eighties. On the weekend, he picks up an old guitar, has a couple of beers and sings away until the neighbourhood dogs join in or his house mate starts banging on his bedroom wall. As much as he would like to be as talented as rocker Jon Bon Jovi… he most certainly was not!
He has a job that most would think was boring – selling par baked bread products, and generally; that assumption would be correct. Yes, I know what you're thinking… 'And I thought my job was boring…' No arguments there on either account. Maybe your job is boring… but enough about your problems; we can talk about that another time. Right now it's about David and his enthralling world of par baked bread. You would be surprised at how many people complain about the size of a bread roll. I know. It's mental, right. However, some days even a complaint about size, get your mind out of the gutter, can be seen as a welcomed change of pace to Dave's otherwise soul destroying daily routine.
He has an ex-wife you know, Laura, and two great kids, Ben and Sarah. Well not really kids, young adult I believe the preferred term is. Ahh, to be twenty again and know what we know now. Wouldn't that be nice?
Anyway, let's not dwell on things we cannot change. As much as we would all like to turn back the hands of time; it isn't going to happen. And believe me when I tell you, that I have tried.
David resides in a basic run-of-the-mill three bedroom house in the suburbs that he shares with the landlady, Bess.
Bess is a funny old thing with her own set of peculiarities. For instance, everything has to be switched off at the wall at night. Kettle, toaster, microwave, television… You name it. The refrigerator is the exception to this rule. Dishcloths have to be spread out, not folded on the kitchen sink. No dirty dishes left in the sink and the cleaned dishes are to be put away immediately.
When water restrictions were in full swing, Bess has been known to stand outside the bathroom door with her arms folded across her ample bosom and her eye trained on the clock. A sharp rapping on the door was to formally notify you that your three minutes were up. Water off!
The lawn has to cut a particular way… not too long, not too short. And the lawnmower catcher, well don't get me started on that.
All the windows have to be kept locked, even though each and everyone is fitted with security screens to keep out any would-be burglars'.
With all these rules and routines you could easily be lead to believe that Bess is a bit of a fusspot, a perfectionist. But with all of Bess's perfectly orchestrated procedures & routines, Bess does in fact have a flaw.
She leaves floaters in the dunny! Yes you heard me right. Bess. Leaves. Floaters. In. The. Dunny.
Dave can't count on two hands the number of times that he's gone into the loo to find a chocolate coloured water python coiled in the porcelain pond staring back up at him. And on a hot day…with all the windows locked… one whiff of that and you're a glutton!
Dave put up with that for two years, the floaters, before he eventually told Bess to 'look before you leave'. And even then he wouldn't have said anything if wasn't for Bess telling him off for leaving a clean coffee cup in the drip tray overnight.
Why does he put up with it you ask? It's cheap, it's clean (apart from the occasional porcelain python), it's close to his work, his kids, and everything was supplied. All he had to do was supply his own bed linen, towel and food.
Dave drives a company car, a Mitsubishi station wagon. And he is glad about that; it's one less expense that he has to worry about.
There are two things Dave misses more than anything in the world since the divorce from his ex-wife Laura a few years back. Not the house, not the car, not even the widescreen television that he had only just bought before Laura spat the dummy and tossed him out. He missed spending precious time with his kids… Sorry, young adults, and Bruce Springsteen, the family pet Alsatian.
Then there's David's best mate, Patrick Madigan, a Detective for Queensland's fraud control. A good-looking charismatic fellow with a body to die for and a singing voice that actually does sound a lot like Jon Bon Jovi, who went missing about three years ago. Patrick, not Jon. And who just happens to be, me.
Oh, and one other little detail that you should probably know. I'm dead. But more about that annoying little predicament a bit later.
So, you get the picture, life is pretty ho-hum for our David on any given day.
Then out of the blue, during a run-of-the-mill sales trip to Darwin in the Northern Territory, David's uneventful life took an unexpected turn when he offered a ride to Tracey, a pretty young blond woman he met in a corner café early one morning.
1 – The Flying Horseman
The night before.
A piercing scream rang out into the dark, starless night, awaking David Oxley. He wiped the beads of sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand and cursed the stifling temperature and the useless box air-conditioning groaning in the wall.
The suffocating humidity was typical during this time of the year in the Northern Territory that was aptly named – 'Troppo Season'.
Every living creature, man and beast alike, lay in wait for the heavens to crack open and unleash their much-anticipated bounty, rain. The powdery earth below gagged for just a spit of moisture to quench its cracked, parched crust.
David sat up on the still-made bed dressed in a pair of white cotton boxer shorts, a recent father's day gift from his daughter Sarah. His mind was foggy, vague from another restless night's sleep, a by-product of the seething humidity.
He looked at the bedside table. One empty wine glass, a Citizen wristwatch and a worn 1947 paperback novel he had been reading by James Hilton titled A Double Life that was coming apart at the spine. Three AM glowed fluorescent green on the face of the built-in clock. He cursed again, this time at the hour as he rubbed his face in his hands; oblivious to what had woken him.
Another scream and the sound of running feet on the loose gravel outside his motel room woke him up completely this time. He quickly snatched a black sleeveless t-shirt up off his bed and pulled it over his head; it was inside out; it didn't matter. He swung his long legs off the edge of the bed, cursing again as he knocked over the half-empty bottle of red wine that he had been drinking before dozing off sometime around midnight. The pool of Merlot merged with the previous stains on the blotchy carpet, making it impossible to determine the new stain from the old. Something to be grateful for he decided; the owner of the place would have only been too happy to add carpet cleaning to his bill. He cringed as a big, black cockroach scurried across his foot and disappeared into the darkness under his bed. He didn't want to know how many others were scurrying around under there gleefully.
He reached the door, unlocked it and ran out into the night. Dark clouds hung heavy in the air, threatening to burst at any moment. Frogs croaked noisily, excited by the pending rain. A flash of lightning lit up the sky. He could smell an exhilarating freshness in the air, the scent that preceded rainfall. He sucked in a long, deep breath and filled his lungs with it.
That's when he saw her, Maggie; the ageing manageress of the motel complex, The Flying Horseman, sitting sprawled out in her floral nightgown on the half-dirt-half-gravel driveway in front of his motel room.
The years had not been kind to her. Deep wrinkles creased her tanned leathery skin. She was struggling in a battle against gravity to get back on her feet. Her rotundas body wasn't making the task any easier for her.
David reached down to help. "Are you ok? Here, let me help you -"
"Bastard!" She spat in her stale coffee-coated breath when she eventually stood. Her marshmallow feet were crammed tight into a pair of equally pink, I've-seen-better-days, slippers. The ones with the woollen fleecy trim that kept your feet warm in the winter. David's own feet began to sweat just looking at them.
"Hey, I was just trying to give you a hand." David said indignantly as he took a step back and dumped his hands on his hips to glare at the ungrateful old woman. Sour old cow, he muttered just as another grumble of thunder rumbled overhead.
She looked up at him as she dusted dirt off her nightgown. "Not you, you fool, the bastard that pushed me over just now, one of Tiffany's friends. I knew that girl was trouble the first time I laid my eyes on her. She's always coming and going at all hours of the night. Didn't you hear her scream just now? Scared the friggin bejesus out of me she did." Maggie continued to grumble as she headed off like a bull at a gate towards Tiffany's ground floor room toward the end of the brick two-story complex. She waived her arms around above her head like she was waving away an angry swarm of bees. "Always late with her rent, and I can do without that headache. I've got bills to pay too you know."
David fell in silently at a safe arms-length distance alongside Maggie. No need to upset the old broad any further he figured. Not that she would have heard he had said anyway. He could hardly hear himself think over the hullabaloo she was making. He glanced around, expecting to see the lights in other patrons room flicker on, but none did. Probably didn't want to get involved. He was starting to think that they were the smart ones.
You wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of Maggie; David decided making a mental note. As angry as a rabid dog would be the perfect way to describe Maggie's current state. Probably pissed off from years of being pushed around and abused by arsehole ex-boyfriends and ex-husbands David thought wearily. That or she was angry about being interrupted from the late night movie she had been watching on television.
He stole a sideways glance at Maggie as they strode closer to the end of the motel complex towards Tiffany's room and decided that Maggie had probably been a beauty, once. He could kind of see a fleeting evidence of it there on her round face. A beauty that had long since been swallowed up by the deep crevices drawn in her leathery skin. The culmination of long hours sunbathing in her teens, before melanoma had become a household word. Alcohol and cigarettes had contributed too over the years no doubt. And then came the bingeing on fatty junk food in front of the TV when youth and all hope of something better was eventfully lost. Suddenly David's own life didn't seem so bad.
Then he also noticed something else about Maggie, and he couldn't help but feel a slight twinge of respect for the woman. Maggie was neither upset nor scared by the ordeal that had just befallen her like most women would have been.
He didn't realise how correct his assumptions were about the ex's and the interrupted late night movie.
David had a God-given talent of being able to read people, well most people. It had certainly been an asset in his line of work as a salesman over the years; however, no such talent was evident with his dealings with women.
Years spent on the road as a travelling salesman had taught him how to finetune his sales skills, not his husband skills, not as far as his ex-wife Laura was concerned.
After spending just five minutes with potential customers David could usually tell if he was wasting his time with them. And time was money. And David didn't have enough of either. Not since the divorce five years ago when Laura, his bottomless money-pit ex had taken him to the cleaners. She had ended up with everything including the two kids, the house, the car and Bruce Springsteen, the family dog.
His old guitar, a garbage bag full of his clothes, and a bread box with a handful of belongings had been left on the doorstep of his ex-house by his ex-wife waiting for pick-up.
David wasn't great at reading women, not where his heart was concerned.
David turned his attention back to Maggie just as another flash of lightning lit the night sky. The heavily pregnant clouds burst open, dumping torrents of rain on the dry powdery ground below, forming muddy puddles instantly. By the time they reached Tiffany's room they were both drenched from head to toe.
Maggie's nightgown had become completely transparent and clung to her round form. Thank God she's wearing underwear, David thought and cringed nervously. A naked Maggie was not a sight he wished to behold on this night, or any other. He wiped his hand over his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, thankful for the respectable coverage provided by big-girl pants.
…2012 release…
Comments are more than welcomed! They are encouraged!
Wishing you all a very Merry Red wine Christmas and a Great Big Girls Pants New Year.
Patti 
One the road again…
