tiger, tiger coffee bar

The next Tuesday (the Fair closed for the day), he asked Old Jim Edmonds if he could have a word and, twisting his hat in his sweaty hands, Changi asked whether he'd ever thought of cats for the fair.

"Cheetahs, Mr Jim."

He was greeted by a frown, and the lie Changi constructed on the spot floored even him, such was the power of its audacity: that he would find the cheetahs, and pay for them himself - half his weekly wage until the animals were paid off.

‘What about feeding them?' the Fair owner had questioned him.

‘I'll look after that, too.'

Changi told the story whenever prompted, and I often led him to the topic as we lulled in the quiet while I helped him oil the amusements.

‘Advert in all the daily papers...they all laughed at me but I got a letter just before going up to the Rochy show...'

Stoned, I thought of Changi then, hollering ‘Every player wins a prize' with a new vigor at the people of wheatbelt Rochester driving the back to Melbourne like a demon, keen to get the ball rolling; keen to get his cats.

‘I got time off - Mr. Edmonds even gave me a lend of one of his old suits, to go to Sydney in. Tooronga Zoo. One of the bitches had eight kittens; three pegged it before they'd seen a day.'

He spat, as if in protest.

‘Bloke said that he'd been told to drown'em in the ‘arbour if he hadn't found the cats a home by the time they were a month old. That was in May'63. I ran the ad for a month and a half in late '62. This Tooronga Zoo bloke was eatin' fish and chips somewhere in Sydney in May'63 and he saw me ad staring straight up at him through his dinner...'

All that day, I thought of this bloke digging into his tucker and finding Changi's soggy, carefully worded treasure, and the fate of the animals if the zoo bloke hadn't come across the notice under his battered fish and coupla bob wortha chips...

Changi loved those cats, caring for them across the Eastern seaboard. I watched the three of them from across whatever reserve or footy ground we made ours for a month, and as I wailed try your luck, knock down the coke bottles! Easy as you like at the overweight fathers in boat shoes and pilled, beer-sloganed polo shirts, I saw all the kids clawing at the cage. Changi supervised them closely, answering the questions the excitable kids threw up, villainous chocolate moustaches framing their curious mouths. Even Mazzoni, the tight-arse fat wog prick that ran the Fair now, he allowed Changi to do what he wanted with the cheetahs. He was a tight-arse, but he wasn't stupid. Who else was going to work for nine-fifty an hour?

I was always amazed at how many kids seemed to be roaming about on their own; and especially here, at Rosebud, after that young Sheree girl only two days before. I'd been watching the news in Changi's van when her story came on. Three streets away from the Fair. They kept cutting to the girl's pink bike she'd been riding, all alone in the street. They interviewed her mother and she just kept grinning - or it looked like she was grinning, like the people on the pirate ship that try to show that they ain't scared, their mouths set in some way that isn't a grimace or a grin - and I thought then that she looked half dead herself; that it was possible to grin yourself to death.

*

The thin crowd couldn't be geed-up about the shooting gallery, however much I talked up the high-powered rifles. That's when I saw the kid in the Metallica t-shirt throw the hot dog into the cage. It all unfolded in front of me: Changi jumping on the kid, grabbing him by the throat and shoving him against the mesh of the cage almost before the hot dog had hit the ground. By the time I got over too them Changi had the kid pinned to the cage, his face crimson and the kid's going blue.