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Secret Sydney, god what a name- covering all manner of sins! One of which being iOTA.
For many of us the Chronicles of Narnia is little more than an entertaining story, for Sean Hape however it represents far more. For many years, Hape was so deep within the closet he was living in the children’s fantasy land. That was until in the late nineties he adopted his stage name officially via deed pole, coming out to the world not only as iOTA but as a gay man. He is quick to downplay any inherent symbolism mind you, stating that he saw the change as a necessity at the time following in the footsteps of some of his childhood idols (Madonna anyone?).
Rejecting the social normalities and refusing to conform to mainstream sensibilities have seen the singer/songwriter and now actor lead a very rich life, though some might argue that his relaxed and carefree approach to his career has been detrimental to his success. Whichever way you look at it though, there is no denying that iOTA has travelled a rocky road to Rock Horror.
With his small, but loyal legion of fans behind him iOTA landed the role of Hedwig in, Hedwig and the Angry Inch. A rock and roll musical about a botched sex change that left poor Hedwig feeling confused and struggling to fit in to American society, after having moved from Berlin to be with the man of her dreams (or so she thought). The play is an interesting piece adapted from the movie of the same name, by John Cameron Mitchell.
Around the same time as Hedwig, iOTA released his fourth studio album, titled ‘Beauty Queen of the Sea’, though critically acclaimed iOTA’s unique sound and personality limited the albums commercial appeal. Nevertheless, iOTA’s appeal is undeniable winning a Helpmann award for his portrayal as Hedwig- beating Hugh Jackman, who was also nominated for the Boy from OZ.
Come and see iOTA in his next theatrical role, as Frank’n’Furter in the Cult Classic, The Rocky Horror Picture Show!
Tickets on sale NOW- www.rockyhorror.com.au/
What happened to Oxford Street?
Recently, the Sydney Morning Herald published the conclusions of a report lamenting the decline of Oxford Street. The report, commissioned by the City of Sydney, found that crime, alcohol-fuelled violence and gay-bashings are discouraging large sections of the public from visiting.
I’m not out late enough to be worried by any of the area’s crime. Sadly, lots of things discourage me from visiting even during the day. Things like:
• Beggars. The same sorry individuals eternally whining for your spare change after they’ve blown their dole money on booze and drugs. ‘Scuuuuuuuuse me……’
• Straight Male Wankers. Groups of open-shirted, gold-chained young men, intent on an evening of clubbing. Frequently pumped up on drugs, they stride down Oxford Street radiating angry, bristly machismo, ready to fistfight anyone who mistakenly assumes they’re gay. By the end of the evening, they’ll be too smashed to score the pussy that they came in search of. They will spend Monday morning at the used car yard where they work bragging about how much they vomited.
• Straight Female Wankers. Chattering nervously and wearing skimpy clothes even if they’re fat, these Paris Hilton wanna-bes can be spotted shrieking into their mobile phones and attempting to text message with their horrid fake fingernails. They will spend Monday tittering with their fellow shop assistants about the Straight Male Wankers who stared at their boobs/grabbed their arse/vomited on their designer handbag.
• Bad takeaway. Clubbers seeking sustenance at 3 a.m. after a boozy night tend not to be terribly choosy. Shrewd owners of fast-food outlets realise this, and start serving inferior-quality food. Anyway, the Straight Wanker crowd doesn’t have sophisticated food preferences even when they’re sober.
The report wistfully concluded that Oxford Street had ‘lost its mojo’. I agree. A more precise diagnosis might be that Oxford Street has become a victim of its own success. Oxford Street became known as a place that was edgy and interesting. Straight Wankers who want to be interesting, and think that being interesting is something that can be bought, began frequenting Oxford Street. Landlords, finding that it is more profitable to rent to high-volume businesses, raise rents. Small, unique businesses like The Pop Shop are forced out. Tawdry clubs flourish.
I still like Oxford Street. There aren’t many other places in Sydney where you can
do your weekly grocery shop at 11:00 pm. But I regret the passing of places like The Albury Hotel, which I first visited on a blistering summer day in 1994. My then-boyfriend, a Manly native who rarely ventured south of the Bridge, took us in for a beer, not realising it was a gay venue. The pretty bartender handed my boyfriend his change, then squeezed his hand and winked suggestively.
My boyfriend and I had a laugh. We realised that were out of place, but knew we were welcome. My boyfriend wasn’t offended by the gay pass. The gay bartender wasn’t annoyed that a straight couple came into a gay business. Could a similar scenario happen now? I don’t think so, and it makes me sad.
Be a Sydney Real Estate Copywriter!
Sick of unpaid blogging? Sydney’s booming housing market offers a career opportunity for writing enthusiasts. Take a look at your local realo’s printed glossy advertising vehicle, or domain.com. You don’t even need a command of English to crank out this kind of copy—one ad boasted that the unit was located in a ‘sort-after’ area—just an affinity for frogshit.
I nearly choked on my coffee when I spotted an ad for the North Sydney rental dump I used to live in. The author shows an astounding talent for euphemisms and flowery adjectives worthy of Mills & Boon.
Why should someone else get paid to do this? Why not me? I’ve decided to give it a try…
Rooty Hill ambience, Liberal voter postcode!
Late Victorian gem, chopped into three flats by an enterprising landlord with a passion for DIY and a jones for illegal wiring.
Nestled between the shabby gentility of Flat 1 (sweeping view of blocks of flats with sweeping harbour views) and the edgy cool of Flat 3 (al fresco shower and loo in weed-choked courtyard), Flat 2 offers the discerning tenant the following prestige amenities:
•Vintage kitchen appliances: H.G. Palmer fridge featuring solid ice block freezer compartment; Metters Slimline stove with ornamental toaster tray, non-functional burners, and heritage bits of dried egg
•Wall-to-wall carpet in trendy Rental Brown; bathroom tiles in Barf Camouflage
•70s Orgasmatron shower unit drains freely into the sewer, without the encumbrance of a water seal. During hot showers, the odour of steaming effluvia adds an exotic Calcutta vibe to this charming retro element
•Handy proximity to Kirribilli’s premium-priced eateries
•Nearby coffee shops with outside tables offer ample opportunities for public preening
•Distinguished demographic: from the P.M. in Kirribilli House, to the colourful denizens of Greenway Public Housing, to the wanker who roars down Carabella Avenue in his red Ferrari, this neighbourhood truly has it all!
A short stroll to the Telstra payphone, the Australia Post box, and all the varied pleasures of this enviably chic and oh-so-exclusive area. Ring 0400 SUC KER for a guided tour. (Those with impeccable references need only enquire.)
You would think that Kirribilli, with its proximity to the Harbour Bridge, would be the perfect spot to spend New Year's Eve. It is, if you have a unit with a harbour-facing balcony. But in years past, I've often had to batten down the hatches of my ground-floor unit, stay indoors, and miss the fireworks. Why?
--Throngs of bogans clogging the trains and ferries
--Bogan single mothers with two or three screaming children in tow
--Drunken bogans throwing/smashing/pissing into their empty beer bottles
--Aggro/drug-affected bogans swearing/leering/disrobing
God, how I envied the champagne-sipping yuppie snots perched on their balconies, watching the fireworks far above the unruly proles.
This year was different. Police blocked off the neighbourhood and performed bag searches, letting no BYO alcohol or glass into the area after noon. Kirribilli was crowded, but not dangerously so. And the crowds were generally well-behaved. Three North Americans did climb on top of the Beulah Street ferry shelter, strip to their shorts, and jump into the Harbour to the cheers of their fellow travellers, but no one got hurt. One tipsy young man was loudly recounting some sexual adventures, but when he caught my eye, he apologised and wished me a happy new year.
I watched the nine o'clock and the midnight fireworks from different vantage points near the water--one with a view of the Opera House, one with a view of the Bridge. Between the two observation points, I got a complete view of the show without being squashed in a crowd.
New Year's morning, there were a few broken bottles and some rubbish, but this was easy to ignore. An atmosphere of celebration and goodwill lingered. Fitness buffs wished me a happy new year as they jogged past my front verandah as I sipped my first coffee of 2008.
Where were you on NYE? Was it good? Bad? Overrated?
Bad Managers in Sydney—Part Three
Bridie O’Wiggie, Operations Manager
Bridie O’Wiggie was different from most bad managers I have met. While ambitious and occasionally ruthless, she was not power-hungry or vindictive. She was perhaps the truest example of the Peter Principle—that people are promoted to their level of incompetence.
Bridie was so unattractive that she frightened people. A firm believer in the ‘can-do’ attitude, Bridie systematically and ineptly attacked her appearance one element at a time. A creature of impulse, Bridie opted for the quick fix as opposed to the careful makeover. Bridie had teeth sticking out at crazy angles. Lacking the patience for traditional orthodontia, Bridie had her teeth capped, resulting in a mouthful of dull, squarish piano keys. Bridie’s natural ginger hair was unmanageable, so she covered it with a black wig that resembled an electrocuted cat. Her skin was the palest pale short of albino, so she periodically went for dark orangey spray-tans.
Homely but clever women often resort to fabulous wardrobes to distract attention from their looks, and Bridie spent a lot of money on her clothes. Unfortunately, her taste ran to vivid colours, busy prints, rhinestones, and outré stiletto heels, usually all in the same outfit.
Looks are unimportant. I’ve mentioned Bridie’s only because the way she dealt with hers is a perfect example of the way she dealt with everything—tremendous enthusiasm, bad judgment, and no forethought.
Bridie really tried to be a good manager. Her bookshelf was lined with titles like “The 50 Habits of Successful Managers,” books full of clichés and dumbed-down McNuggets of information designed for people like her, busy people with short attention spans who believe that for every problem, there is a quick fix.
Bridie gleaned the following ideas from her library of management theory drivel:
• A good manager has a sense of humour.
Bridie did not get jokes, but she learned to recognise from facial expression and tone of voice that a joke had been made. She would force a laugh, but only after taking a split second to send the joke through her political correctness filter.
• A good manager promotes a ‘fun’ workplace.
Bridie did not understand fun, either. Fun is essentially pointless, and Bridie never did anything without a goal in mind. But since the management manual said that employees work harder if they have fun, Bridie organised cricket matches, trivia contests, and Easter egg hunts. She never noticed that employees resented this enforced jollity, as it often meant that they would have to stay back to get their work done.
• Having a company mascot is a great idea to improve morale.
Why stop at one mascot? Bridie populated the office with several, all of them stuffed animals that made some sort of noise when you pulled a string.
• Team-building exercises foster an atmosphere of cooperation.
Bridie forced all team leaders to conduct team-building exercises with their plebs. We did. Nothing changed.
• Negative language leads to an unproductive work atmosphere.
Bridie forbade us to say ‘no problem’ or ‘no worries’ on the grounds that these ‘negative’ phrases falsely implied that our company had problems and things to worry about. (We had a 48% turnover rate. No problem!)
Would that Bridie’s shortcomings had been limited to a love of hideous clothes and goofy management theories. Unfortunately, she had an explosive Irish temper and a ‘ready, fire, aim’ style of implementing her madcap schemes.
Bridie announced that the Quality Control department would be a thing of the past. Why? Bridie decreed that ‘going forward’ (one of her favourite phrases) no one was allowed to make mistakes, therefore, Quality Control was not necessary. Bridie shouted down anyone who predicted this would not work. Once Quality Control was gone, Bridie shouted down anyone who told her it was not working. When clients started complaining about defective products, Bridie shouted at the employees who had made the mistakes. When employees quit because of the verbal abuse, Bridie shouted at the team leaders for not retaining staff. When the team leaders resigned, Bridie hired new ones and shouted at them when mistakes kept happening. Finally, Quality Control was brought back. Bridie claimed that she had been opposed to the demise of Quality Control all along, and blamed the fiasco on another manager who had left the company.
Variations of the Quality Control debacle never stopped happening. Bridie instigated many other costly disasters, and to my knowledge she was not held responsible for any of them. The Director lived on a higher plane of existence, buzzing in and out of the office with his mobile stuck to his ear, repeating ‘price per unit’ and ‘return on investment’ like a mantra. My guess is that Bridie presented him with a spreadsheet of massaged figures and distracted him with fanciful descriptions of her next master plan.
My, this post is getting long. I haven’t the space to describe Bridie’s many other displays of bad judgment and just plain lunacy. I bailed from the company when Bridie sent a lackey to our overseas branch to sort out the problems they were having with English. The lackey was a functional illiterate who failed to solve the problems and created several more. Upon her return to Australia, the lackey was promoted.
I declined an exit interview.
NYPD New York Style Pizza & Hotdogs, come back!
Another great hole-in the wall eatery has disappeared, and Sydney is the poorer for it.
NYPD Pizza, which served New York-style pizza by the slice, is gone. Gone the way of The Pop Shop and dozens of other unique businesses that used to make Oxford Street a magnet for all sorts of people, not just gays and clubbers.
Not being a foodie, I don't have the vocabulary to describe what made me regularly break a bus journey or even cross the Harbour just to get one of their monster-size pepperoni slices. The sauce was heavenly. The crust had that perfect balance of chewiness and crispiness. The two sisters who ran the place were friendly and chatty, and always remembered my usual order.
A newer pizza place has opened at NYPD's former location. Unfortunately, it has the featureless look, feel, and taste of a franchise. This is what McDonald's would do to pizza. Bland pies with bases that look pre-formed, displayed in a sterile plastic case. The sauce is tasteless and has a slimy mouthfeel. The allotment of cheese (and toppings) is so skimpy that I left feeling hungry. The slices are served too hot--let it cool or risk a blistered tongue.
At the new place, I didn't try chatting with the clerk, a dreadlocked teenager with dead eyes who burnt the first slice I ordered. She put the slice in the oven, then disappeared into the back of the shop and forgot I was there. Not that much conversation would have been possible over the noise of the offensive rap music that was playing.
To the former owners of NYPD, if you're out there, I'm holding on to my loyalty card in the forlorn hope that you will return.
Shopfast--I give up!
When I started using Shopfast in 1999, they were great. Buy your groceries online, and pay only six dollars to have all your stuff delivered. For someone like me, who does not drive and buys lots of bottled water, it was a godsend. No more schlepping back and forth to the neighbourhood grocery with a little upright trolley, which for some reason, made people eye me with curiosity and/or suspicion. The trolley was wire, red, and purchased at a two-dollar shop in Marrickville--there was nothing inherently threatening about it. I guess the problem was that people associate trolleys with (a) stooped little old ladies carting crates of cat food back to their flat, (b) Asians going to and from Paddy's Markets, and (c) derros wheeling around their filthy blankets, newspaper clipping collections, and casks of Arkansas Jed's Fire Eagle Piss. The spectacle of a young, healthy person pulling a trolley down the footpath screams "WEIRDO" in the mind of most Australians.
Shopfast rescued me from this weekly embarrassment, and had other benefits, as well. The groceries were delivered in enormous, sturdy cardboard boxes that made excellent storage containers, and came in handy during my too-frequent moves, whenever I was bounced out of a house-share. The variety of goods on Shopfast always exceeded the choice of goods at the local supermarket. Premium cat food that you can usually only buy at the vet's. Premium wine and liqueurs. South Cape feta cheese. Amazing choice of bottled water--sparkling and still, imported and domestic.
First, Shopfast replaced the deluxe delivery boxes with cheaper and less sturdy boxes, then did away with them altogether. Fair enough. You weren't supposed to keep the boxes anyway, and anything that saves the environment is good. I did feel sorry for the delivery drivers though, who had to unpack all the merchandise from the reusable plastic crates.
It was around this time that the delivery drivers started looking more rushed and harrassed. One driver told me he was quitting because Management were cramming more deliveries into time slots and demanding that he work inconvenient shifts, without increasing his pay. More work, more time-pressure, and complaints from disgruntled customers who were too stupid to assign blame where it belonged. As someone who was temping in call centres, being screamed by middle-class farts in a froth of impatient greed about the accrual of their credit card reward points, I could empathise.
Then the range of items offered narrowed. No more vet-approved cat food. Gone was my preferred brand of cheese biscuit. Oh well. I could get those items elsewhere and carry them home in my backpack. Anyway, I primarily used Shopfast for things too bulky and heavy to fit in my bicycle panniers.
Then I stopped buying milk, because the cartons delivered only had a few days to go before the use-by date. Shopfast always credited my account when I complained via email (not to the downtrodden driver), but it kept happening, so I gave up ordering milk.
Then things were frequently out of stock. Anything over a certain number of items triggered an 'unusually large quantity' flag in the minds of the Shopfast computer, which meant my bottled water orders were frequently unfilled. 'They'd be using Just In Time inventory control,' my husband sneered. 'Modern companies are run by middle-class deadshits showing off all the fancy systems they learned in management school.' In other words, the sort of people who threatened to call the Ombudsman in my call centre days when I explained that I could not reinstate the expired bonus points that they'd been hoarding for six years.
Prior to the delivery of my most recent order from Shopfast, I got an email saying that seventeen of the items I had ordered were out of stock. I called Shopfast's 1800 number, waited in the queue listening to the 'your call is important to us' recording, and explained to a weary-sounding, patient, and exquisitely polite operator that I would like to cancel the order, and that Shopfast's management needed a kick up the backside.
Guess it's time to buy a new trolley.
Does anyone else use a grocery delivery service in Sydney? Please comment below.
Mr Bakayaro, the most disgusting Japanese I have ever met
Mr Bakayaro was the owner and manager of a tiny human resources agency that, theoretically, specialised in the placement of Japanese speakers. I say ‘theoretically’ because in my two months there, we never actually placed anybody. The other four employees of Bakayaro Pty Ltd speculated that his family in Japan were embarrassed by him and paid him to stay away, or perhaps were yakuza using him to launder money.
Mr Bakayaro was extremely short, plump for a Japanese, had dandruff, and frequently came to work unshowered. He freshened up in the men’s room with deodorants and a weird-smelling cologne that he kept in an ancient, cracked vinyl gym bag. He also suffered from chronic tinea, and walked around the office barefoot to expose his fungus-plagued tootsies to fresh air. In moments of deep concentration, he would rest his bare feet on the desk whilst staring at the breasts of whichever of us four women was in his line of vision. During stressful telephone conversations, he would wind the telephone cord in between his toes.
The job was typing in Japanese, translating articles for a shitty self-published bilingual newsletter, and expanding our client base. Fresh from a six-year sojourn in Japan , I thought Mr Bakayaro had hired me for my language skills. It soon became apparent that I had been hired because I was tall and blonde. I also discovered that the agency’s core clients were older men whom Mr Bakayaro entertained at a mid-price massage parlour somewhere along the Pacific Highway.
The Japanese typing was more difficult than it should have been, and not just because Mr Bakayaro’s handwriting was sloppy. He was also too cheap to buy a word processing program. I had to work on a free demo version one in which the dictionary didn’t contain polysyllabic words. Rather than phonetically typing in the whole word, I had to type each syllable one by one, and chose the correct character from a long list that popped up on the screen.
The translation was even more needlessly difficult. Mr Bakayaro enjoyed seeing his employees make errors or take a long time to do something, as it gave him an excuse to shout at and belittle them. He would hand me a fax to be translated, making sure the print size was small and the quality adjusted to the lowest resolution, so that difficult characters with lots of tiny strokes came out blurred.
Sometimes I accompanied Mr Bakayaro taking prospective clients to lunch at a private club, where the silver-haired, bespectacled receptionist greeted us with impeccable politeness and a frigid, unwavering stare. I assumed she was just another menopausal cow who disliked seeing a younger woman accompanying an older man. I later found out that the club was quietly initiating proceedings to throw out Mr Bakayaro after some unspecified offensive behaviour on his part. I never found out what that behaviour was, but I did find out, months after I walked off the job, that two of his female clients were suing him for sexual harassment.
Can you top this? Please comment.
You’ve probably worked for at least one or two bad managers. Here’s my first snapshot of a manager I’ve had the misfortune to work for in Sydney:
Bad Manager #1
Tempesta Omnivore, Call Centre Manager.
Call centres should be a temporary stop on one’s career path, someplace where you spin your wheels for a year or two whilst writing your novel or waiting for your big acting break. In return for working for shit money in a relatively comfortable environment, you should answer a reasonable number of calls and honestly try to provide polite, efficient service. You should not have to suffer verbal abuse from screaming menopausal witches who want you to give them information about their husband’s account, or ask permission from your team leader before going to the toilet.
Our little cubicle farm wasn’t so bad, as call centres go. We had an interesting mix of employees: gay men, older women, backpackers, budding fashion designers, out-of-work actors, aspiring writers, and young people who were thrilled to be working someplace other than Pizza Hut. The pay wasn’t great, but we had a decent incentive system and monthly barbecues with free piss.
Tempesta Omnivore, a career call centre manager, changed all that.
Did anyone see Eddie Perfect’s routine on call centres in “Drink Pepsi, Bitch”? I think Eddie Perfect must have worked in one of Tempesta Omnivore’s call centres.
Overweight, hard-faced, aggressive, thirtyish, and single, Tempesta tried to compensate for her plainness of face and figure by squeezing her size-18 body into size-16 designer suits and separates. Tempesta jacked up the KPI’s, took away the incentives, and fired all managers who knew more than she did. Then she embarked on a series of affairs with her subordinates, including a married bisexual.
When the married bisexual went back to his wife and baby (no, I’m not kidding), Tempesta began firing anyone she thought might be laughing at her behind her back, which was pretty much everybody. I managed to find a real job before she sacked me.
Can you top this? Please comment.
Points of Passion—Part Seven
In the exciting climax, Kellyville homeowner Cade must make a choice. Will it be Riana, credit card reward points, and a McMansion? Or HOOTER, her cat o’nine tails, and an inner-West dungeon?
Part Seven
As Cade scrubbed HOOTER’s shower floor on his hands and knees, the sound of Riana’s terrified wail pierced his heart like the 20 cm bread knife from the Zwillig Pro 7-piece carving set they’d only recently ordered from the Telstra Visa catalogue. Ripping off the silly French maid’s uniform that HOOTER made him wear for his sessions of Household Humiliation, Cade raced up the stairs, his manhood flopping impressively with each purposeful stride.
At the top of the staircase, Cade was confronted with a sight that was worth at least half a million reward points, maybe more. Pinned to the wall was his beloved Riana, Queen of the Telstra Visa complaint call, famous in call centres throughout the Christendom for her shrieking nasal insistence that “These reward points belong to ME, too! Marriage is a partnership, and my husband and I have an equal partnership! He makes the money, and I SPEND IT!”
Pinning Riana to the wall was MISTRESS HOOTER, Queen of all things below Cade’s belt, who didn’t have a Telstra Visa Card or a Westpac Altitude Card, and who, if you offered her one, would sneer in your face and ram that stupid piece of plastic up one of your unmentionable orifices.
The two were crushed together, corn-fed D-cup bosom (Hooter) to demure A-cup bosom (Riana), arousing Cade’s deepest lust and generating an inner conflict that might sustain one of those tacky supermarket romance novellas for at least a couple hundred pages. Whom would he choose? Riana, The Goddess of Domestic Materialism, or HOOTER, the High Priestess of the Damn Good F---k? Or maybe…God, it was almost too much to contemplate—BOTH AT THE SAME TIME??!! Suddenly, Cade wished he was still wearing those frilly white knickers, or something, anything, to contain his swelling excitement.
HOOTER and Riana both dropped their eyes to inspect Cade’s fifth limb. Riana, her throat closed by HOOTER’s powerful grip, could manage only a dutiful wifely squeak. It was HOOTER who spoke. “I didn’t order you to salute me,” HOOTER said, pleasantly, but with a definite undertone of menace. Cade, obeying his Mistress, willed his member into submissive flaccidity.
Riana wrenched herself free from HOOTER’s grasp and flung herself into Cade’s arms. Her lips, blue from lack of oxygen, could barely form the words, “Primary… Cardholder…Rewards…Statement… need…to…PUT A COMPLAINT IN WRITING!” With that, Riana crumpled into a dead faint. Or seemed to. Riana, clever secondary cardholder that she was, knew that nothing aroused a man’s protective urges like the appearance of female weakness. Riana hadn’t really fainted. Riana, eyes closed and lips parted sensuously, only pretended to be unconscious while she listened to Cade and HOOTER. It suited her to let Cade handle everything. Besides, she was itching to know, what does HOOTER have that I don’t?
“Give that bitch a good smack,” HOOTER ordered Cade, who gave Riana a backhander across her prissy little mouth. It was for her own good, he guiltily told himself.
Riana screamed hysterically and beat her tiny fists against Cade’s hairy chest. “That’s no way to treat a lady!” she sobbed. “Especially when the lady is about to present you, in six months’ time, with ANOTHER SECONDARY CARDHOLDER!”
The force of Riana’s tidings hit Cade like a thunderbolt. Riana was about to give him—A LITTLE VOUCHER! A loving little bundle of reward points! A pint-sized product redemption!
“My Darling,” Cade said, gazing into Riana’s insipid, self-satisfied face. “How could I have ever doubted the terms and conditions of our marriage contract? Let’s go home and look at that Telstra Visa catalogue again. I think I remember seeing something about vouchers for Babyland.”
Actually, Babyland was in the Bank of Queensland Sunshine Rewards program booklet, but Riana was too busy savouring her triumph over HOOTER to correct him. “I think we’ve just discovered just who’s listed as an Authorised Person on Cade’s account, and WHO ISN’T,” she said to HOOTER, with fake sweetness.
HOOTER was boiling with rage. “YOU AREN’T LEAVING ME!” HOOTER shouted. “I’m throwing you out! GET OUT OF MY DUNGEON NOW, YOU TWO SUBURBAN POINT WHORES!”
Cade and Riana departed, hearing HOOTER’s front door slam behind them, then open again as HOOTER tossed Cade’s pants out after him, though out of pure spite she refused to surrender his shirt or the new trainers he’d got with ShooBiz vouchers. It would be a long trip back to Kellyville. Cade was shirtless and barefoot. They had three million dollars combined debt on their credit cards. Their BankWest reward statement kept going to the wrong address. But who cared? They’d think about all that tomorrow. After all, tomorrow’s mail might bring a credit card application for the Suncorp Clear Options card!
THE END
EPILOGUEMistress HOOTER was so distraught at losing her most loyal slave that she closed her Bondage and Discipline Dungeon and went on an extended fast food binge, eating herself into a size 28. She now runs a shop—HOOTER’S MUU-MUU LAND, specialising in colourful attire for the full-figured woman.
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