Story for Kele!

This post is for Kele, recently in Hong Kong, who said he remembers something from when he was a very young boy, that he finds so strange he now thought he must have dreamed it. Rats! Fridge! Screaming! Hysteria! More screaming! No, Kele honey, it was no dream because I well remember it too.  And here's what went down!:

In Brisbane, when we were Post-Grads at University of Queensland, 1984 (?) (many years ago anyway) we were living in Gailey Road in Toowong.  You flew out from Fiji to stay with us shortly after Brisbane's Big Beer Baron Billionaire bought the block of woodland on the hill immediately behind us and promptly sent in the bulldozers to rip the whole forest out.

And that's when 13 acres of wildlife promptly scuttled down the hill and took up residence in our humble quarter acre. In our house mostly!

Our German Shepherd, Duke, couldn't handle the inundation, let alone the sinister slinking presence of The Ghost, so took off,  hying himself off into the great wild yonder, right when it became illegal for dogs to wander alone through the streets, and so, after many individual search-and-rescues and dragging him behind me because this was one animal who simply didn't want to be in our Crazyland, when I found he'd made himself at home with the sweetest old lady who clearly loved him dearly and was such a sweetheart I wanted to stay with her too, I surrendered all his doggy paraphernalia to her and left him there.  Bye bye Duke!

Duke was smart to leave. It was months of hell-on-earth with a house full of hundreds of possums and snakes and giant bush rats and a lone charismatic frilled-neck lizard, all followed by the strangest and creepiest giant albino blue-eyed feral cat we promptly named "Ghost", because it looked like no cat we'd ever seen before, and when it scratched Louise's cat, Mad Max developed the worst ever rampant infection around the wound and, even with constant vigil by our vet, died within 26 hours ...  so Ghost was one evil cat we stayed a zillion miles away from, despite the fact that, for some unfathomable reason, he took up residence atop our phone and so we went months never answering calls.

And there were The Possum Wars every single night as hundreds of those suckers vied for territory in the loudest imaginable way, and every morning we'd find dozens of newly squashed possums all over Gailey Road outside our place, as the losers were driven out of our garden to find a new home. And after so many, many sleepless nights ... we didn't care!

And we had a houseful of those winsy-small almost-extinct marsupial mice called Delicates, about 50 of them, who behaved in ways that were really quite unearthly, like they had some big One-Mind thing going on, and I've wanted for years to find someone to give a report to because, well, they're almost extinct and no one apart from us seems to have any idea of how they behave ... but I've never found someone who works in that field nor even anyone interested so ... whatever!

And there were those snakes everywhere that we co-existed quite happily with until I got the book "What Snake is That?" and discovered they were all deadly and, even though none of them were the heartless attack-killer kind, after that I found them too creepy to be endured ... and I have particular memories of being in my study with five of them around me and a seminar paper that had to be delivered in four hours so having to pull the table into the centre of the room and sit on it, cross-legged and trying to keep as small as possible, to finish typing it up.  And what made this particularly ironic was that the paper was on "how Australia forged a sense of national identity despite the tyrannies of distance and toxic wildlife."

But the incident you remember is the Didi thing, right?  When you came to stay with us, Julia sent Didi down as well so the two of you would get to know each other!  Anyway, Didi noticed the noises coming from behind the fridge and kept asking about them.  I said I didn't know what was there but to just ignore it and to stay well away because they were probably snakes. Didi, however, being the most disobedient little girl, saw that as a reason to be naughty so, the minute my back was turned, stuck her head around the back of the fridge ... and a giant bush rat ran down her face.  She screamed herself into a state of hysterical paralysis and fell onto the ground.  I was cross and kept saying "For heavens sake, get over yourself! It was just a bush rat running down your face. Big deal!"  ... and then, as I was saying it, another bush rat leapt off the top of the fridge and ran down my face ... and I started to scream hysterically too!

Couldn't help myself.  It was the creepiest, nastiest thing imaginable!

And that's the incident you were asking about, right?  That you distinctly recall from when you were a boy? And, yeah, yeah, you're right, it is surreal, nightmarish but mostly FFFUUUUUNNNY!!!!

Just recalled there was also a great deal of hysterical screaming when our frilled-neck lizard did his neck-whoosh at her!  Man, that girl had a set of lungs on her!

What happened at the end?  Nothing really.  When the jackhammers started up the hill, building the foundations for Beer Baron Billionaire's ridiculously massive mansion, all our wildlife slowly made their way further down the hill, losing many to the Gailey Road NIGHT SQUISH, until there was just we humans left in the pink house on the hill you remember so well.