Marigold Flowers on the Handball Court

IT WAS HOT, I mean real hot. We wore shorts and shirts with short sleeves and shoes without socks and all sorts of stuff. One guy wore a singlet. It was the biggest event of the season:

LUKE LAWSON'S GRAND ANNUAL HANDBALL TOURNAMENT

ALL WELCOME!

12 McLACHLAN STREET, FORTITUDE VALLEY 12:01pm SHARP.

I kicked a marigold flower out from between two slabs of concrete in the parking lot behind our sharehouse to make way for the biggest event of the season - handball. I had to ask some guy to move his rusty old car which had a big white sticker on the back windscreen that read "FUCK THE POLICE". Once I explained what it was all about he was more than happy to oblige. "You kids gotta get upta somethin', I guess" he said. His eyes were always open really wide.

Anyways, even my little sister came to play. I hadn't seen her in ages; which is another story. So, we had about twenty players and more people sitting on the back deck spectating. People had descended upon the sharehouse with cartons of beer and they used them as chairs. Some others sat on the handrail of the balcony. Still more just stood around. Some just sat right where they were. We all enjoyed the Saturday golden afternoon lunchtime sunshine.

There was a pair of sunglasses shaped like two electric guitars getting around the punters and everyone was putting them on and taking photos of each other and themselves and hugging. Sparky the golden Pomeranian upstairs was yapping away and ran down and licked me on the chin when I picked her up for a cuddle.

I had a pretty wicked speaker setup at the time and just about anyone could plug their phone or ipod or whatever into it and just let music fly off into somewhere else. Everything was ok. I'd alerted all the neighbours well in advance. It was an annual event after all; this one just happened to be the first.

People ducked and dived, and did moves which cupped the ball ever so slightly to keep it in motion and people would sometimes yell "INTOE!" for "Interference with the ball" or "AH SHIT!" when they lost a game. Everyone was pretty good, the best move in my opinion was when somebody faced their back to the other player and hit the ball inbetween their legs. It always looked cool. Even if the ball flew off into a hedge, or over the fence.

There were four squares all marked with letters in chalk, which stood for KING, QUEEN, some other guy DUKE or JACK, or JOKER or whatever you liked, and then DUNCE; which was the most important square to me because it was where everyone started when they entered the first of the four squares; making their way up to be the LION, I mean KING. Yeah King was the top spot. King of the... JUNGLE!!!. Although this was more of a concrete savannah so yeah, make it up for yourself; we did.

People talked about all sorts of things and others made dashes off to the bottle store to get more cartons of beer. I gotta say, there ain't no thing much better than a cold beer in the Queensland Sunshine in summer. People would call it "real passport shredder weather" on account of them never wanting to leave or go anywhere else or do or see anything anywhere else. It was the same thing all the time, like the squares on the handball courts. All of us had felt like Kings, Queens, Dunces, Jokers and all the rest. But here everyone was equal on account of the amount of amber beer, golden in the sunshine, consumed by all.

My little sister won the tournament, we had a trophy and everything, and afterwards we all went up to the BRUNSWICK STREET HOTEL to play pool on a round pool table with blue felt and sing Karaoke. The BRUNNO, as it was known, had the best air conditioning in town; and all the old winos around town knew it. They sat there all day playing the pokies and running the horses on big television screens and at night they would sing their songs and the whole community jumped in on it. The tiles in the bathroom were the same as the tiles behind the bar.

Johnno was an old wino who didn't drink no more; but he never missed Karaoke night. He had a whispy beard and horrible teeth but he always sang HELLS BELLS by AC DC like nothing else. He had to stand up there for a while just taking it all in when the guitar solos went on and on and we never tired of watching and listening to him do it.

We all loved it. "HELLS BELLS!" He’d yell when the chorus came on. He was a bit quieter in the verses.