up there … in the sky
‘Here’s these two youngish blokes, about thirty, thirty-five? I dunno, swarthy looking blokes, know what I mean? Shave every other couple of days.’
Geoff and I have met midway along the beach, he’s holding a tight, tangled ball of fishing line in his large fist and I’ve found a lost lure that looks and feels like an over large maggot, but it’s pink. Do fish see in colour?
‘Come out on their verandah and launched a drone. A small black one which they let hang a second or two while they decided what to do next … then boom, it’s zipped halfway over the river and stopped dead, then lifted three hundred feet up above the mudbank. Straight up. Sat up there like a hawk for a full minute. I could hear its motors.’
A bikini-clad lovely approaches. Attention wanders. She walks by. Neither of us look back.
‘Then,’ continues Geoff, ‘it zooms away up river to the first bend. ZiiiiiPPPP.’
‘So I walk over to the edge of my verandah and look down on these two boofheads, they’re busy flying the drone but after a bit one of them looks up at me. I’m looking down at him.
‘He says – Wassup?’
Geoff’s thinking this bloke’s asked the question he would have liked to have asked him.
Geoff said he found a Ballina road map and stuck a pin where his place was, then stuck another pin at the bend in the river where he lost sight of the drone, just across from the Big Prawn.
Four kilometres..
Geoff’s working up to it now, his end chapter – and it’s going to be a big finish if the sight of yet another near-naked, long haired, impossible beautiful young woman walking towards us doesn’t dent his flow. She trails a thin ribbon of perfume. Not everyone got munted on New Years Eve.
‘So I walked out on the back deck, looking north-east, and wondered what that drone might hover over if those two blokes next door wanted to have a shot at it from the own back verandah, looking the way I’m looking.’
Ballina Gateway – 5 kilometres.
‘Wassup?’
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