Dear reader, we find our heroes once again in deep shit. Shit of the fundamental, environmental, physical, metaphysical and spiritual kind. It’s an unedifying predicament akin to a fair character assessment of Scomo. With more bases to a fair hearing blocked more assiduously than evidence in the Zac Rolfe’s murder trial, whichever way you look at it, it pays to have mates. And our heroes all 3.5 of them are led and take comfort in being led by Australia’s most decorated and noble soldier EVER Benny-Boy Roberts Smith. Whichever way the omelette is baked Benny-boy will be at their side, on their backs, and over and out. There might be no other way out than all in, and back to front, but forwards is backwards and in between when you’ve got seconds to live and your choice is commandeered by Sophie. Sophie or Hobson’s the coin is two-sided, and you’ll lose the toss, so we must toss-on as tossers do… 

‘What was that sound’? Ces Whispered, ‘I dunno’’ murmured Ben. 

‘Is it coming from there’? Quent pointed to the low dark slab of a building. ‘I think it is and I don’t like the sound of it’, whispered Terry. 

‘I dunno’, muttered Ces, ‘but this gives me the creeps’. 

‘Yeah, and if that banging isn’t bad enough, if that horrible banging could stop we could try and think straight, but after all we’ve been through things just seem to go from bad to worse’. 

Indeed Quent was right, it’s often difficult to emphasise with people in dire straight’s that’s why we at pcbycp support the Federal Governments glacial response to bush fires and natural disasters. To rush impetuously and support citizens in the act of survival or recovery could skew the governmental process, and take politicians minds off the main game of investment portfolios and tax payer funded sinecures post a parliamentary career.  (ed)

‘Too right Ben’, Quent sighed, ‘it’s almost as if just as you thought there was no more shit to tip onto Scomo’s character, another pile of shit is dredged up and added to the last, till there’s nothing you can see but just a pile of shit’!

Benny laughed, ‘That’s the technique we used to identify the enemy in Afghanistan, if they were thrown into a cess-pit and didn’t drown they’d have to be working for Isis’. 

‘Yup’, muttered Terry in fulsome agreement, ‘finding terrorists and witches aint changed much as ASIO strategy all these years, cept the witches aint all wearing britches’. 

We all paused, this was a controversial and strangely contemporary statement from  a man who’d been entombed beneath Maralinga for sixty odd years. 

Was Terry making an oblique reference to lgbtiq and trans sex, intersex and mutant gender definitions within government, or was he just referring to changed underwear requirements since the 50’s? We decided not to question him on his line of thinking as there may be a tendency to spend the rest of this descriptor debating the vexed question of trans and inter sex definitions of witches. We leave that task to a higher authority, the  Fair Work Commissioner and its exalted board member Sophie, and with Pru Goward and her mates all parachuted onto the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and any other publicly funded sinecure. We knew that an individuals rights, provided they could stump up the fees for legal representation were in good hands, it was a comforting thought. 

‘Still, I don’t like the sound of it. What is that sound? Could it be code’? postulated Ben? 

‘I dunno but its sounding a lot like the Drums of War’.

‘Yeah, cept these are more like Bongos in which all the skins are being split, and someone’s tried to re- skin the bongo with….. I dunno. Paper, bits of plastic sheeting, or’…. 

Benny filled in the pause  with something obscene or unimaginable, but it betrayed in just one instance his experience as a professional soldier, ‘Or’.. he added with a sanguine wheeze … ‘with human skin’!

At that utterance we all froze. 

The thought though hideous and ghastly beyond imagination, had a measure of truth in it. Knowing that in some way, Sophie, Dutto, and most likely Angus as ring- leader there’d be a close link. To break that link, or discover just where the path of iniquity, corruption, vice and depravity led was an unenviable task. Though it may lead us to the board of Crown resorts or worse, we had to find out. And out salvation or downfall was buried within.  In the end the only choice we had, was not Hobsons, but Sophies! Ben spotted another niche across the other side of the street. ‘Allright youse, when I give the signal I want youse to wait for me there, if anyfink happens i’ll give youse covering fire, 

On the count of three. 

Is this an order’? asked Ces, ‘sort of, and besides what other choice have we got’. 

We gulped and Benny gave the count; 

‘One’, and the sound of the drumming got louder. 

’Two’, and the sound of something else, something more blood curdlingly eerie penetrated the gloom. 

‘Three’, as we crouched, slid, sidled, inched our way across the street we began to hear something much worse. From the bowels of the very earth? Was it from inside the building? 

A scream?

No! Not a scream something more sinister. The sound of something much more sinister. Was it another rendition of the ‘Belt and Road song’? 

Was it a sequel to ‘Up there Cazaly’? Or even worse ‘Gday Gday’? We had to find out, and we knew whatever we did find was not going to be in the Cliff Richard songbook.. 

Will this be there last short movement? Will this be the chord in e flat major, or will minor suffice? Minor or Major they’re in deep shit.  Find out what happens in the next episode, ‘Not enough sinecures for mates on the Administrative Appeals Tribunal’, or ‘Towke and Scomo and Hawke, the Good, the Bad, and the Unedifying’