Caution Wet Floor

I arrived in the city without the hill in February 2010 with nothing to do but shop and do artwork and home decoration and generally drift about not thinking too much and noticing everything…then I went on a spiritual pilgrimage to Spain a few months later. I was away for two months. Upon my return in July, I made a lame effort to get jobs at Very Fresh Fruit and Veg and at Super Food Barn without success. I went on bike rides around the lake. I took photographs of anything and everything that took my interest. I made hundreds of asymmetrical wave generators. I hung out in coffee shops and tried on dresses that took my fancy. I noticed everything.  
I discovered some very interesting things pertaining to the head honchos of the city where I live. They are not very nice people. I managed to foil at least a few of their pernicious takeover plans…if not all…since this whole situation blew up in my face in 2010. More on that later.
In early 2011…around March I met up with an old friend and enemy. Suranan e Absolam Salah.
 He gave me a job…as a data processor…that I did not ask for. I am his unpaid servant…essentially.  In the beginning I was working only for him. Now I work for the other side as well as for him. Basically I am stuck in the middle which forces me to be a double agent whether I want to be one or not. Since both sides have vested interests in this city without a hill and in some cases less than noble intentions towards each other’s offspring…I tend to go with whatever side is espousing  theories  most like my own…if neither of them are…I go my own way.
Rob Wallace accompanied me to Spain…that was the beginning of this crazy adventure I am still on.   It was April 17, 2010… spring time in the northern regions. The Camino is a spiritual pilgrimage that is at least a thousand years old and nearly that long….It was in the La Rioja region that I discovered the Lizards lair.  Not only that but I think I made my peace with Estella the Lizard Queen. With so much water under the bridge we could have been enemies and by then it was just pointless.  In the end we discovered that we both wanted the same thing….an exciting new adventure.
Oh…btw…how I met Rob…Rob broke into my house…actually it was a fruit and veg shop, I was working the till and he was a customer…but it was a bust in by any account... and then because of his predicament and partly because of mine I made him my spying and adventure accomplice. Rob… I was to discover was a wartime refugee…he was on the run from bandits at the beginning and end of time…which was a huge dilemma for me.
So arriving back in Arcadia was a pleasant surprise…even for someone like me who is used to surprises…to cut a long story short. The city without the hill was not the same city that I left…it was like I had fallen asleep then woken up in the future….

Caution Wet Floor.
This was my first clue and the inspiration for many of my predictions and subsequent explorations.
First off I saw a magpie perched on a bucket. Next to it was a sign…it said Caution Wet Floor….inside the Grand Central Palace!!!
The floor did not appear to be wet although the bucket was right next to a large, dark grey, square shaped, granite slab over which water continually ran. Could ‘they’ possibly be referring to this flat fountain? It was a ridiculous. It was a fountain. You could not see the running water. You just knew it was there. Sooo maybe they had to warn people about that. And… if the floor had ever been wet, how did the water get on it. Did it come from the fountain or did someone spill their drink. Why leave the bucket there? It was after all a very grandiose and public part of the building. And it wasn’t just any building. It was the central palace of the Grand National Assembly…possibly the most splendiferous structure in all the land. 
The new palace was built into city hill and city hill was my old stamping ground. Every time I go there I picture how it used to be, when I first came to this city as an eleven year old in 1971. A group of us metamorphose kids went there on a school excursion once. It was an excursion with a botanical theme. Carefree and curious among those long gone gum trees, we inspected bark, banksia’s and bugs, varieties of leaves and flowers, rocks, sediments and strata…and collected specimens for our school projects.  Later when I was living in a forest, not far from the hill, I would sometimes go there at night with my friends from the  indoctrination colleges… we would run around like mad things, smoke herbal relaxants and tobacco products, put on various theatrical performances like pretending to be people from another era such as Victorian, Edwardian and Sumerian.
I remember once…I was the only girl with five boys…none of us had any clothes on. It was the middle of the night in the middle of winter. We decided to swim across the lake. Squidgy Green and Slippery Pinko were there along with Rusty Jo, Woody Cornish and A R Ving. That is all I remember.
Excuses for digressing…on that particular November day I remembered the hill as it was then… not that I am sentimental about it….being there just brings back those memories. The hill was gone, carved out and covered by the new central palace in all its half buried magnificence. I don’t even know why I went there. I was curious perhaps…about the writing on the Common’s Bridge and the bright flash of light from the Warriors Memorial Hall that momentarily blinded me as I walked down the tunnel towards Reconciliation Bridge the previous evening. It was almost/ exactly 8.30 when I saw it.
“Did you see that”, I had exclaimed in wonder to Rob the previous night. He hadn’t. He was looking down absorbed in his own private conversations.
I had noticed the messages scrawled in pink chalk on the pedestrian access on the way over the bridge. On the way back I noticed them again. One message in particular jumped out at me. I don’t remember the exact words but it warned of a ‘pulsed microwave audiogram’. Naturally I wondered if there was a connection to the bright booming flash of light that I had seen coming from the Warriors Memorial Hall.  It was pointed at the Grand Central Palace.
Birds are messengers, of that I have no doubt.  As for the bird on the bucket…the message was clear. If a wild bird can find its way into the centre of a building via security vestibules and a grand foyer bypassing elaborate rooms leading through to other elaborate rooms, promenades and walkways or up sweeping staircases leading this way and find itself a nice resting spot that was both theatrical and geometrically succinct… defined as it was by a fountain and a flag. If a wild bird can do that… then surely I too would find shelter in the heart of this city….as it was I ended spending about a thousand years living it up in Yarrabah and was in dire danger from a crocodile attack during one of the episodes from that adventure….but that is another story. 

The Time Tunnels of Iniquity

Only a split second has passed and I realise that I have already been to Bargaloo, there and back and more than just the one time. On a previous visit, I thought I would find some peace and solitude. It was ok but my flatmate turned out to be a ghost as did several other of the town folk…I got quite stressed about the situation. Another curious thing that happened is that our planet was invaded by an extremely advanced, warlike, metallic type of race…only problem was…for them…was that they were microscopic…I know for sure they got stuck in the pipes of the house I was in.  Imagine the ignominy of that…alien invaders from another dimension on a futile quest to find the Time Tunnels of Iniquity and they end up getting stuck in house pipes. I have no idea what happened to them or what to do with them.
 I could hardly wait to get back to the city. I left Bargaloo and took up residence on the outer edge of the time wave war  zone of the city…Rob’s mother’s house. There were some frightening moments. Time waves crashing into each other again, bringing more horrors. It was March…always a scary month. All I could do was hibernate. I had to cut myself off from all the technology and society and lie in the dark for days on end. There was weirdness going on. I heard four dogs being killed one night only to discover that four dogs had been killed that night  two hundred miles away and yet the police had cordoned off a nearby street.  A tyrannosaurus rex egg hatched and a cockroach turned into a butterfly. A baby went missing. No one was running the country. Many of the world leaders had returned to the sea. A delegation from Thailand turned up and took office. I had to relive the horrors of being a Phoenician sacrificial victim. I had an episode where I was tricked into eating crushed up insects, which made me very ill. Oh Lily I can’t tell you enough about  the horrors and general upheaval that is my life.
I moved back into my apartment with Rob a while later. Of course coming back to this city is a mixed blessing…both tumultuous and exciting and sometimes quite boring and repetitive. Today I went to visit my mother or rather your mother. It was not a pleasant experience but I needed to find my nail polish collection, which I may have left there.  I had an urge to continue my work painting Egyptian hieroglyphs on rocks collected from Culburra Beach. She wasn’t home. Her house has one of those doors that has glass panels on either side of it. I rang the doorbell and knocked a few times but no answer. I looked through one of the glass panels checking for signs of life…what I saw was horrifying in the extreme Lily. There was a white light at the end of a tunnel but there was this dark shadowy thing standing in front of it stopping people from going in. I knocked on the door but there was nobody there….. I saw something which confirmed my worst fears about her. She is not your mother or even mine…basically she’s an astral freak.  Usually you can spot an astral freak by how old they look…but not always.
Ok I’m back…I have been back to my mothers house…everything is ok…her real self was back in it’s astral shell…but for how long…it’s impossible to tell…so much has happened…There is a new street fighting gang in town…it’s run by the Moulden brothers…as you can see for yourself they are very rough…not refined like me or kool like the lost boys. Did you know that the lost boys have formed a gang of their own and that Danton…my son and yours Lily…he is now a fully flighted member of their bird of prey group. I have seen them around town. One day I snapped them sneaking through a car park in Civic or should I say the backstreets of Bargaloo….
As for Nico…do you remember what he looked like when he was born…he was a little blue baby with scars on his head…he’s much improved but his relationship with Miles Tankard is a worry….as you know. Miles Tankard is Humphrey Tankards son and I do not much appreciate him. Nico told me that he found Miles blubbering his head off in Fallik Lane…because get this he was bitten by a short black snake.  I suppose Nico felt sorry for him because among other things…he had heard that Miles got kicked out of Fergus’s gang as he himself had been kicked out of Danton’s Bird of Prey gang…so now they are like each others only friends…if and when they happen to bump into eachother in the back alleyways of Queenstown or Civic cos they are both banned from each others enclaves.
By now it should be clear to you that I am detection agent and the City without the Hill is my detection lair. My esteemed colleagues include most cats, big cats and dogs…and birds.  My main spying accomplice is my friend and patient Rob Wallace….who drives me everywhere I go and can assist at times in my deliberations.

The Hidden Dragon

Lilly… I have discovered that several secret organisations are using code to communicate important information.  And they are using every medium of communication you could think of…apart from obvious symbols like pictures of circles and clocks, geometric shapes, and the like… they are using  advertising material and artwork  in a far more devious way than I could of realised. Other signs included markings and paint effects on the walls, weird street names, paint markings on the roadwork, witches hats with writing, official looking plaques and government notices, stickers and number plates, stick on notices at traffic lights, shop window displays, glossy  fashion spreads, graffiti, crosswords, horoscopes, street art,   electric lights even…the list is endless. One time I had to pay a visit to the National Assembly Headquarters. As I approached the entrance to the building I happened to notice that numerous signs had been placed all along the promenade leading up to it. The signs all said things like Danger Icy Surface or Beware of Skidding on Ice, Caution Wet Floor, and Don’t Slip on it and Ice Skidding Hazard. Lily there was no ice or water within cooeee of all those witches hats.  Another time my accomplice Rob and I  had to go to a secret building at the Department of Defenders. It was Valentines Day and we had to deliver flowers to someone’s girlfriend, who had already left the building. Oh the hoo ha, the receptionist soldiers would not take the flowers to the aforementioned persons office because they thought it had a bomb in it. But that was not the weirdest thing that happened. As we approached the building along a little path with nicely mown grass on either side, there was not one but two signs warning of the danger of snakes. Snakes Lily! Caution Beware of Snakes it said. Why would the Department of Defenders be so worried about being bitten by snakes there and nowhere else. I have never seen a Caution Beware of Snakes Sign anywhere ever…even in places with long grass around like schools…Why would you bother unless…soldiers are really, really scared of snakes or… it was code for something…anyway I wrote a song about it.
After that I began compiling huge dossiers on all the factions involved in this debacle…if I can call it that.
My dearest Lily, it is now April 19 2012….I am still in the city and you are still residing in Bargaloo and vice versa…what I am going to tell you is of utmost importance. The situation here is very dangerous. Members of the Jin She Wah have been tracking my movements. On Friday night an oriental gentlemen booked into the hotel. That night the fire alarm went off. There was no fire!  They are trying to flush us out Lily…Rob was in a hurry to get out…I didn’t believe for one minute there was a fire. We tried to leave the building via the back entrance but it was locked. So we hurried out the front reception area and hid behind some chairs. l was already freaked out by an experience I had a few nights earlier. I was in Japanese style of house when I was lunged at by three oriental gentlemen in Ninja style outfits. One of them had a huge sword. He swung it high above his head and was about to bring it down on mine when a midget ran out and saved me.
What I am about to tell you could freak you out completely. Humphrey Tankard is married to Sindy Faulkener.  Their youngest son, Miles has a few issues…It is a new type of mental illness. I should know I have suffered terribly from this mysterious ailment, as you will too Lily.  Make it your business to ingratiate yourself with Miles and Fergus. Miles knows a lot of stuff about what’s going down here and Fergus has some interesting friends…including two duplicates of himself.
Mr Rat is one of the top dudes of the most notorious street fighting gang to ever exist in this city. He is known as the RatMan and basically he is a gun for hire. To be near him is to hear the sound of gun shot. The lady with the evil eye is none other than Sindy Faulkener. She is the supreme performance artist…I warn you. The guy in the bowler hat is an agent. There is something going on with him and Fergus’s duplicates. The fat guy and the guy in the hoodie are members of Fergus’s gang. The guy in the middle of them is Miles. Words cannot describe……
By now you are probably wondering how I got myself in to this mess and why you should get yourself in it too. I am sure as you wander around the sheep paddocks of Bargaloo, and stare at the lake you will be imagining it and not really believing in it.  I beg you Lily do not have a nonchalant attitude about this. You are going to have to have your wits about you when you arrive in the city…believe me there is more intrigue going on in just one of the enclaves here, than there is of all of Bargaloo and its surrounds. Each and every enclave has its own unique and peculiar mystery. Some of it you would find hard to believe.
For example re: the ancestors of the Jin She Wah who built the underground tunnels under the city. I was living in this city when they were building those tunnels all those thousands of years ago. I found a map of their plans, another secret map of the tunnels as well as evidence that a secret underground medical laboratory had been constructed there. I told Fergus’s great grandfather about it and he had me assassinated. Before I was killed I managed to compile a dossier of the plans and a variety of artistic interpretations of the events.
As you can see the war was terrible that is why it is so important that you remember to leave me some messages when you arrive in the city…so that I can stop the same war from starting all over again.

Dearest Lily You don ‘t know me and you are never going to meet me because I am your parallel self. My name is Sandy Parker. I live in the City without the Hill. The city did have a hill once and I used to explore it. In those days the city was known as KanaK. One day soon you’re going to wake up in my apartment in Kanak…except it won’t be called that…and I am going to wake up in Bargaloo. You won’t remember anything of your old life but I will. A long time ago, you and I had long flowing hair and wore long flowing dresses. Sometimes a group of us girls would go by City Hill Road and be road statues…it was performance art and we prided ourselves on how much we had perfected it. At other times we would walk, eyes fixed grimly ahead, silently and quickly in a big black huddle from one end of town to the other revelling in all the attention that this would supposedly bring. Our audience was fast, captive and fleeting. You don’t remember do you? That’s all in the past now… It is extremely important that you believe me. I cannot get back to my own time unless you help me. I am including a collection of photographs that you took Lily. Photos taken by your future self in The City without the Hill….in the future. You’re future Lily! Lily, I know all of this is going to sound unbelievable to you, so I will tell you everything. Lily you are not going to spend the rest of your life in Bargaloo and you are not going to marry Humphrey Tankard. Please do not get upset about this. He may seem handsome, charming and rich to you now, but believe me when I say he is a very, very dubious character. He is married to your nemesis and they have two boys Fergus and Miles . They also have an adopted daughter…I think her name is Nyssa. Trust me you will get to know the Tankard family very well, so forewarned is forearmed ok…. A word of advice…avoid contact with Nyssa…if at all possible??? Lily, as you can see from the photos…I am a very attractive women and Rob is a very handsome man…I am not going to comment on the looks of Humphrey Tankard or his brother Bogie or their sons or Rupert Moulden and his sons because…well because you will see for yourself. As for Miles Tankard….say no more…. I know you must be feeling utterly bewildered about all of this…so I shall tell your story and maybe one day you can tell me mine…and vice versa. The City has both visible and invisible rulers. There is the National Assembly and then there is the Grand National Assembly. The Queenstown Newspaper is a very powerful organisation and is ruled by a man…or rather criminal…by the name of Marvin Cavendish. The television stations and all the radio stations are owned by Rupert Moulden. Both Rupert and Marvin have close ties with Jin She Wah, a notorious mafia brotherhood that runs a sex slave trafficking racket. Since their arrival…about 10 years ago… Central Plaza and its environs has gone from a ‘civilized’ and ‘quite culturally interesting’ place to chill out in… into a red light district that rivals anything I’ve seen in Fishwicker or King’s Cross. There are rumours that the Jin She Wah also run a black market trade in rare and exotic meat products. Apparently their ancestors build a huge network of tunnels in, around and out west of the city that has many levels and uses. The Department of Defenders recently found out about it after a tip off from me and was shocked. The Jin She Wah had been using it as a base for like a thousand years or something….God knows what other horrors they found. Like you, I take photographs of interesting and or suspicious things. I have taken a few photos of Bargaloo evidently. Believe me I was surprised myself…I didn’t know that I took them. I notice everything and if I can I get a picture of something more interesting than the lake at Bargaloo, I will…I notice everything… I notice very small writing… but only on walls. I notice myriads of objects in various shop display cabinets, rooftops, weird announcements, clothes colours, and scraps of old bill posters still stuck on a walls in suburban shopping centres and the like. I have discovered something that is sooo true…the best way to hide something is in plain sight. Most people in Bargaloo don’t notice the things I do because they are always thinking about where they have to go and what they have to do for their job and other stuff…like the bills. I don’t do that. I am very, very suspicious of Tony Farrell. I know he is in cahoots with someone or something but what or who? The Usuranan? A draconian faction? The mind boggles. Tony’s offsider is a woman named Gaye Proo Bragg. She is like a token female in the National Assembly and she is not the only one. No one takes any notice of them. Her reputation was recently ruined when she was caught on camera partaking in some secret men’s business at a local brothel when she should have been attending a major political do. I have to warn you about the women in this town. Most of the young ones are now working in brothels…it’s not like they have any choice about it. The old ones are either homeless or on welfare or both. Some of them work in brothels as well. It is impossible to get a decent job unless your fat and ugly or you’ve got contacts in high places and the only way you are going to get contacts like that is by working in a brothel. Nearly all the children are being raised in day care institutions which teach them to be good robots. It was not always like this. If you are fat and ugly then you can count yourself very lucky indeed. Just being fat will grant you entry into the fat women’s clubs. Being ugly is a bonus too… if that’s what you want… because it means that you will be taken seriously by the men folk…they will think of you as one of them. Now you may be wondering ‘why would I want to be a member of the fat woman’s club’…believe me you don’t…but you may not have any choice about the matter. The gravity field of this city is quite extreme leading to excess poundage….plus the food here is especially designed to make people fat…I know it sounds crazy…but it’s true….sad but true. The medical establishment in this city is basically owned by Rusty Jo and McToothy McVee. It is called MediVaccume. They’ve been running a bowel cancer testing racket for a number of years now, for reasons that elude me. They employ an army of thousands just to look at shit under microscopes. You will be sent bowel testing kits and info to your home address and as if that isn’t bad enough you will be assailed with posters and information leaflets about it at your local apothecary store….and get this…only people over fifty can have the test, which is weird because once a person turns fifty in this town, they get thrown on the scrap heap. Should you suffer from a genuine medical emergency requiring treatment at the local hospital…such as a mangled or burnt hand or a stick in the eye, expect to wait many hours and if your lucky an exotic looking doctor from a foreign country will check you out, tell you that you have a peptic ulcer or a skin disease and you will be out the door in the less than five minutes if that. Make sure you have a first aid kit with you when you arrive here. Another character you need to be wary of is Maurice Hoody…he owns a string of blood collecting buses. Whatever you do, don’t donate any blood…it doesn’t go to the hospitals to treat the untold number of apparently bloodless people…I should know I have been to one of those hospitals, the only patients I’ve ever seen there are ghouls…very, very old ones…They don’t let old people die in this city. They keep their astral shells alive for as long as possible. As for where the blood goes…my guess is as good as yours…you know about vampires don’t you? Lily…I am truly sorry to have to bombard you with all this worrying information, I just think you should be prepared that is all. There are some things you should know about the Department of Defenders. They are primarily banana soldiers. Their main job is to fight terror with terror and to send soldiers out to far flung regions of the world to hunt down terrorists and tabloid artists. They are so busy hunting down terrorists in other countries and checking luggage in shopping centres and at bus stops, that they didn’t notice that our city…my beloved city and yours too Lily… had been invaded by the Jin She Wah. I became aware of their nefarious night time activities a while back when I was living in a place called Beard…you will know this place as the Estate of Oak Trees. What they do is this….they build tunnels and lay pipes and mine metals and stuff like that by pretending to be construction workers. They dress up like them and drive trucks that look like official government construction trucks and the like and when they want to extend one of their tunnels or put in ventilation shafts or something like that, they will just converge on an area, bold as brass, set up road blocks and just do it…Nobody takes any notice of them…not even the National Assembly officials…I suppose because everyone assumes that it is all above board council work or something…and it’s not their department or concern. Well it’s too late now they’ve over run the city…The Jin She Wah owns it now.