Fici Delendae Sunt – The Figs Must Be Destroyed

A Novella

by

Paul F Walsh

for

Sam and The Beast

Dramatis Personae

Sam	a dog with an unknown past
Cicero	a cat with a well-known past
The noble senators	readers and listeners of this wagging tale
The Laman Street figs	fourteen living as one
Veritas	the goddess of truth
The bottlebrush	a urinary associate
My master	Buddhist owner of Sam and Cicero
Mother Teresa	a saintly chihuahua, friend of Sam
King Phillip	a renowned canine tonsurist
The Diet Squad	a legion of starving dog-catchers
Diet Squad dullard	a very dull chap with a shiny heart
Labrador	a passing distraction
Lusty poodle	a passing heat source
The crowd	human members and supporters of the Save Our Figs group
Ignoramus	Deus Conflictus, the god of conflict
Spartacus	a dead dog
The chooks	backyard aerobics companions of Sam
The guards	hapless council contractors of ambiguous loyalty
Cyd	a brown-and-white wolfhound
Satan	a black hellhound, friend of Sam
Barabbas	a German shepherd and a useful vaulting horse
Fig creatures	birds, flying foxes, possums
The author	a paradoxical person who gives a fig
Simone	a herald and a photographer
The trolls	persons projecting vitriolic opinions
Sherlock	an obese beagle with a fat nose for detection
Lily	a feisty Maltese terrier
A passing policeman	a discerning rotunda of a chap
The kookaburras	a metaphor for readers to discern
The bus driver	a barbarian collecting imperial heads, and tails
Two white doves	a flight from the Aeneid?
Henderson	a famed Novocastrian ghost in Wolfe Street
Cerberus	a vicious brute of a guard dog
Charon	the ferry dog
The god of news	Sam’s divine muse
Alexander the Great (Dane)	a stoic podium of a dog
Smiling men	wearers of sackcloth suits in the shadows of King Pyrrhus and the cross
A grinning digital figure	a predictably anonymous troll
Followers of Ignoramus	faithful disciples of division
Dietmar	a Novocastrian artist and collector of memorabilia
Maximus	a racist bogan of a dog who loves Pooper Cars
A passing bogan	what does his ill-fitting Sydney suit represent?
The new figs	condemned as surely as their predecessors, or are they?
Bernie	the best friend a man could ever have
The mourning sawyer	a killer of a paradox
Jacinta	a comforter of Sam
Jesus, Mary and Joseph	the holy family of cocker spaniels
The three followers	the last to value property over people
The new council	everything old is new again, or is it?

I

‘You’re man’s best friend, Sam,’ Cicero entices. ‘Why not tell the noble senators the truth about the Laman Street figs?’

Can they handle the truth, I wonder?

‘May Veritas inspire your oration, my dear boy.’ Cicero presses his front paws together as though in prayer.

I should explain here that Cicero is my typist. He is also a Maine Coon cat, a mind-reader with cerebral blinkers, my dears.

Cicero does not always comprehend the full mental narrative, and he sometimes fails to discern between silent cogitation and vocal utterance. He is also in denial about the mental limitations of his mind-reading gift.

‘Nonsense!’ Cicero hisses. ‘Pure doggerel!’

Cicero thus belongs to the realm of indiscriminate pounders of the keyboard who occasionally type spoken or unspoken thought as well as the story being dictated. It is for the reader to discern between these two confusing streams of consciousness, but I must warn you that Cicero regards the resultant literary amalgam as an oration. And he views any potential readers or audio listeners of his often cryptic, erroneous typescripts as Roman senators.

My past life might explain my eloquent grasp of languages and my passion for Sanskrit and classical civilizations, but nothing can fully explain Cicero. I think he’s barking mad! In this life at least!

I feel I should offer him some snuff to temper his madness, but I’ve no idea, in the conscious sense, of what blasted snuff is, or why I should refer to it as Gust of Gomorrah.

I apologise in advance, my dears, but, being a dog with limited digital dexterity, I’m stuck with this admittedly flawed, clawed and pawed secretarial option.

I only hope that my sensitive canine realism shines through Cicero’s periodically caustic feline posturing, though I must admit that he is the most likeable detestable being I have ever encountered.

Over the years our English intonations have mutually matured into a rather fruity Cambridge accent as though we are two elderly dons uncorking a verbal punt on the River Cam. Cicero’s typescripts inevitably reflect this evolutionary linguistic affectation.

We live in a Cooks Hill terrace in Gibson Street with a bottlebrush at the front steps. I know that bottlebrush well. Our master is the Buddhist chaplain at the u…’

‘I have no master!’ Cicero trills. ‘It is you who is of the slave class. I should be dictating to you!’

Reincarnation has a lot to answer for in our household.

Cicero can trill like a bird with a range of Maine Coon octaves that once mesmerised the Roman senate. It’s a good thing I’m fluent in catish, and that Cicero and I share a polyglot’s love of orally blending languages to the brink of polymathic polylogy, my dears, but Cicero only types in English and Latin due to …

‘You’re losing your audience again, Sam,’ Cicero trills. ‘The noble senators are bored witless! By Gad, tell them your story! Release the beast from the bestiary!! Wear your heart on your fur!’

I do wear my heart on my fur. There’s a distinctive heart shape emblazoned on my side like some form of prophetic talisman. And the beast inside me is a creature from the past, though the past, present and future are said to be one, are they not?

I’m an investigative tree journalist. I love trees! I’m the Woodward and Bernstein of tree journalism in this city. And, yes, I do have at least two personalities lurking within my current canine persona.

‘Now for the digression,’ Cicero advises, swishing his bushy tail as though adjusting his toga. ‘I will not say that one of our local councils is … and then segue back to your love of trees.’

Will you shut up, my dear chap, and let me tell the story!

‘Such refined eloquence,’ Cicero snarls. ‘How do you spell growl?’

I shouldn’t have growled at him, but there are limits to journalistic patience, my dears. Mother Teresa would have growled! And she’s the meekest chihuahua I know.

My story begins …

‘At last,’ Cicero moans.

I’m ashamed to say it, my dears, but I growl at him again, this time exposing my front teeth. I’m barking mad now, but I know he would just fall off my master’s computer chair, roll around the floor laughing, annoyingly peddling his paws in the air like some demented, inverted cyclist, if I really barked at him.

My story begins when my master and I enter a laneway behind Gibson Street. The grand terraces on either side are adorned with murals. A large sea-beast threatens to eat me while a giant rendering of King Phillip is razor-shearing a sheepdog, one of those long-haired English snob breeds that has no place in the Australian climate. Not unlike Cicero, come to think of it!

‘I am nothing like a dog,’ Cicero yowls, ‘though I do admit that my long hair and bushy tail are those of an eternally well-groomed snowboarder rather than an unwashed surfer with more wax in his hairy ears than on his borrowed board.’

It’s true, my dears. I do choose to ride my master’s surfboard at Horseshoe Beach rather than chase sticks, and it was at Horseshoe Beach that I first encountered the Diet Squad.

‘The Diet Squad!’ Cicero falls off the chair laughing. ‘Did they whip out their luncheons and bash you with them, my dear boy? Did they use the capsicum spray?’

No, but they did sink my boat.

Well, it was a protest boat stopping dirty, stinking coal ships from entering the harbour, and my master and I were offered a seat just near the outrigger thingy, and standing on this thingy in full view of Nobbys, I was giving climate change the evil eye, as only a weathered old seadog can do, when a police power ski accidently …

I had the biggest fright of my life, my dear boy. I was trapped and drowning in the darkness under the upturned boat. I mean, I knew how to dog-paddle, of course, but swimming under water … I couldn’t dive to save myself.

‘So what happened?’ Cicero is back at the keyboard now.

I woke up on Horseshoe Beach with a member of the Diet Squad trying to pump me.

‘I cannot type that!’ Cicero rears. ‘Good Lord, Sam! You mistake me, my dear fellow.’

And you mistake me for a common vulgarian. You’re far too quick to consign me to the plebeian gutter press, though PRESS is the operative word here.

I’m an investigative tree journalist, and there were trees floating in the harbour that I wanted to interview. They know a thing or two about carbon, by Gad, and I wanted to ask for their views on coal, get the rural perspective on global warming from further up the Hunter. That’s why I had my official PRESS jacket on. I was on duty!

Anyway, this very dull chap from the Diet Squad kept pressing on my side in accord with what he thought was a printed instruction for pumping the water from my lungs.

So I vomited on him, my dear boy, a real dog’s breakfast. And then I chased a passing labrador in and out of the harbour swell, just for the sheer hell of it!

I really broke free that day, never dreaming the Diet Squad would eventually catch up with me.

‘That was an excellent digression,’ Cicero says, ‘but you were in a laneway next to a mural of the king.’

II

There I am, staring up at King Phillip, the greatest canine tonsurist in the world. His mural is offering to cut my fur to match that of my owner.

Well, I’m as vain as the next dog, but, as you well know, my owner is a Buddhist monk with a shaven head. Now that would be the unkindest cut of all, my dear, so I cock my leg on the king’s trousers, and I turn with monumental relief into Laman Street.

And then I’m accosted by a passing heat source. It’s difficult to maintain one’s dignity with a freshly coiffed poodle sniffing at your buttocks.

I want to tell her to bark off. I even consider telling her I’m gay, but I tell her nothing because I have a copy of Cicero and the Roman Republic in my mouth.

So, I put my tail between my legs, and I pull at my imperial lead, whining and griping against the republic like a demented radio shock jock, trying to convince my master of the sudden urgency of returning the book to the library.

My dear boy, it would do me no moral harm to read Cicero and the Roman Republic, I admit, and I do love ancient dog-eared books with an antiquarian’s binding passion, but why do you think my master borrowed it?

Do you think he suspects that you and I are reincarnated souls?

This isn’t the first time he’s shown apparent interest in your former life. Remember that bone bust of your senatorial self from Villa Bone that I chewed the ear off?

‘How could I forget?’ Cicero grimaces.

I’d love to know who I was, like you do, but I’m rather distracted by the unexpected closure of the library!

SAVE OUR FIGS! SAVE OUR FIGS!

The roar of the crowd consumes me.

SHAME! SHAME!

I drop the book at my master’s feet and howl in solidarity.

I find myself pawing at the council barricade, now adorned with colourful protest imagery, and then I smell what I cannot see.

I howl even more.

There’s a roaring silence from Ignoramus:

FICI DELENDAE SUNT! FICI DELENDAE SUNT!
THE FIGS MUST BE DESTROYED! THE FIGS MUST BE DESTROYED!

Stay virtuous, my dear chap, I whisper to myself as I bare my teeth. Stay virtuous.

My master is pulling me back on my lead and urging me to calm down. I know I should, it would be the Buddhist thing to do, but I’m torn between my current and past lives.

The conservative socialist within me is roaring: What is sacred can never be destroyed!

I growl at myself: STAY VIRTUOUS!

Such is my anger at the intended sacrilege that I bark and bark and bark and bark: CAVE CANEM! And then I howl: VIRTUS!

And so it was that the very next day, my master, the one you refer to as NOT MY MASTER, a rather rotund Buddhist monk with a shaven head and hairy attitude, my dear fellow, joined the Save Our Figs group.

SAVE OUR FIGS! SAVE OUR FIGS!

And we, my dear chap, thus became de facto members of the four-legged chapter of that very august body; a magnificent multitude of rebellious quadrupeds that Spartacus could have led if he had not been so lamentably put down.

‘I knew ultimately that it was I who was responsible for our civic activism, my dear boy,’ Cicero boasts. ‘A mostly vicarious contribution on my part, to be sure, since I’m not an early riser, but it was efficacious and not without scriptural merit that you ALWAYS leap from the bed like a canine Peter in anticipation of a crowing cockerel.’

He is referring to our dawn shift on the Dawson Street picket, with a veiled reference to my backyard lust for chook-chasing.

Nothing wrong with it, my dears, consensual chasing only, and it keeps the chooks fit and virtuous. Unlike Cicero. Lazy as sin!

Typical cat, he thinks sleeping is a form of gymnastic exercise, and he loves the sound of his own purring, my dears, and he delights in portraying himself as the reason for everything in existence. Now there’s a frightening existential leap in the dark, and leaping in the dark is one of his feline specialties.

I swear I saw Cicero leaping from seat to seat in the Great Theatre at Ephesus in the twilight of my former life. But it was probably a Turkish stray.

If only I could see who I was in that former life!

I do recall giving a lecture on Roman geology …

‘I’m sure the stone seats at Ephesus were a captive audience,’ Cicero snipes. ‘You were speaking of the dawn shift?’

So I was, my dear chap, so I was.

But I am thinking secretly, my dears, that Cicero, the great Maine Coon orator, could talk a stone to sleep.

And this thought, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, is in response to his rather bitchy captive audience remark, but I know where this blasted thought will lead.

‘Don’t tell them where it leads yet, dear boy,’ Cicero scolds. ‘You’ll lose them as an audience. The noble senators need to be kept wondering, Sam. They need to experience narrative tension. And why do you periodically insist on mentally speaking to the readers as if I can’t hear you? I’m a mind-reader! Thinking secretly? Only a moron treats his audience as equally moronic.’

You would know, my dear chap, you would know.

If it’s narrative tension you want, dear fellow, there’s plenty on the Dawson Street dawn shift. And there’s plenty of beauty and camaraderie as well.

Every woman and her dog, every man and his dog, manned that unholy barricade for months in our attempt to protect what is sacred.

III

I hear the ring of the alarm clock. I hear your snoring, dear chap, as I eat my breakfast off the laundry tiles, al fresco lamb cutlets from a vegetarian master. We are each condemned by theological and dietary paradox. Lamb of God served by a frowning vegetarian Buddhist!

After breakfast I enter the Circus Maximus on my winged chariot, granting the chooks three glorious circuits of the backyard past the Tiberian thunderbox until they take fluttering refuge on its rusting corrugated iron roof.

And then I lap dirty brown water from the broken cistern while I contemplate wars that will be fought over the last unpolluted aquifers and the fate of millions of displaced water refugees dying from thirst. Why I should be contemplating such things, I have no idea!

But at this time in the morning, my dear boy, I’m not dying of thirst. I’m dying for the proverbial leak. So I greet the bottlebrush in the customary urinary fashion before walking on my lead from Gibson Street to Auckland Street.

As we turn at the Conservatorium, we can just see the flickering candles and torches of the SOF night crew, some of whom have erected tents, and we make our way to our central position close to the barricade. My master greets the hapless guards as he rolls out our prayer mat and my stuffed cat.

‘Your what?’ Cicero yowls.

It’s a dog thing, my dear chap, mauling a stuffed cat reeks of canine solidarity: THE DOGGOS UNITED WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED: that sort of thing! We can’t have the other doggies thinking I’m batting for the other side.

‘But you are batting for the other side, dear boy,’ Cicero trills.

Not in the sense I mean, my dear chap, but back to the dawn shift: I even met an old friend from puppy pre-school on our prayer mat at the Dawson Street picket in Laman Street.

‘Don’t tell me.’ Cicero begins to preen himself. ‘She was the answer to your prayers, dear chap!’

She was in her way. A fair-breasted brown-and-white wolfhound named Cyd. Her owner was a fan of Cyd Charise. It was Cyd who called a meeting of concerned dogs to discuss the fig crisis from a canine perspective.

There was quite a crowd there. Too many dogs to name, my dear chap, but Cyd spoke for us all when she declared that Ignoramus was trying to HACK OUR WEE-MAIL. These figs were multi-faceted from a canine perspective, my dear chap: urinals, post offices, news outlets, wee-mail network.

It was Satan, of all the black hounds God ever created, who reminded the meeting that ‘these beautiful figs have fashioned an arboreal cathedral, a sacred grove, a living memorial; they are a parable of unity in community, fourteen living as one’.

There was much supportive howling at such eloquence from a hellhound like Satan, even Barabbas the German shepherd was moved to tears, my dear chap, and we voted unanimously to piss on Ignoramus and to SAVE OUR FIGS!

But as the months unfolded, and we waited each morning to be confronted by the police, anger and outrage were tempered by love. There truly was unity in community in Laman Street. The lines were blurring in more ways than one.

I recall reaching for my monocle, which did not exist, to read the latest news story on a guard’s laptop as he held it up for us protesters to read, and that news story spoke of a ONE-VOTE majority for killing our figs and a repetitive refusal to allow an independent risk assessment.

BASTARDS was the word I heard floating from the guards’ side of the barricade, whereas our side was too depressed for speech. SILENCE says so much, my dear.

‘Why don’t you try it some time?’ Cicero purrs.

We were always silent just before dawn, my dear chap. We are one with the figs at that moment. We are one with the stillness. We are one with each other, humans, dogs, birds, flying foxes and possums.

According to Ignoramus, no creatures live in the condemned figs. And yet, we watch day after day in the pre-dawn darkness as possums and tawny frogmouths return to their nests.

As the first rays of light temper the eastern sky, the cathedral choir bursts into birdsong from a thousand warbling throats, and we sigh at the richness of it all. The righteousness of our cause is renewed in our hearts. We are defenders of beauty. We are defenders of nature.

A kookaburra laughs from high in a fig tree opposite the Cultural Centre. We have watched him guarding his nest for weeks. We have watched his instinctive anxiety grow. And yet still he laughs at the humans below.

And one of those humans greets me now and pats me on the head. By gad, haven’t you graduated yet? I ask, but all he hears is my moan of contentment.

The last I saw of this fellow, he was postulating a novel on Petrov. By gad, it’s Sophocles, I told him then, your plot is reminiscent of Philoctetes. And the plot now thickens in my canine mind since this author knew the beast I was!

WHO WAS I? I scream, but he only hears a desperate whine and pats me again. And then some woman named Simone, a herald I hear, starts taking photos of me! A herald of what, I wonder?

The author says he will tell the story of the figs through my mouth. Is he insane?

He comments on how the defenders of the figs come from the full spectrum of left-wing and right-wing Newcastle; how he wants to capture the protest bird in flight with left and right wings flapping in literary equality.

‘I’m beginning to like this fellow,’ Cicero says. ‘If he wants to capture the bird in flight, I could advise him.’

IV

We hear the tramp of the jackboots, and I’m reminded of the connection between hoplite warfare and the rugby scrum.

The centurions are upon us.

I cross the line between reporting and participating.

I slip my lead and go rogue.

It was very unBuddhist of me, my dear boy, very unprofessional, but there you have it.

I turn with the crowd to face my worst nightmare: The Diet Squad: a legion of starving dog-catchers, uniformed louts regurgitating their luncheons, itching to spray their capsicum, gluttons for a fight.

‘But one did save your life, my dear chap!’ Cicero interjects.

I blame lack of a classical education, my dear boy! Each of these Diet Squad lads has probably graduated with a masters degree in thuggery.

Education should be about whom you become, NOT what you end up doing for a crust.

My dog’s bollocks to all low-fat, utilitarian retail degrees, my dear boy, and a pox on the shameless academic whoremongers who sell them!

Education can never be bought or sold, my dear fellow, it must be earned! By gad, it’s not a commodity; it’s a unique cathartic experience, an experience not visited on the robotic charge of the lite brigade in Laman Street.

The Diet Squad charges the executioners’ crane through the crowd like a wounded bull.

A wrinkled grandmother, a graduate of sixth class, waves her wrinkled umbrella. A cinema owner sits in the gutter with film in her eyes. A barista barrister urges a caffeine-addicted long-hair not to get arrested. An old balding man shakes his arthritic fist.

A former citizen of the year joins in the chant: SAVE OUR FIGS! SAVE OUR FIGS! SHAME! SHAME!

The crowd surges, and the Diet Squad marches on, relentless.

A man eating a sausage roll is screaming there is no diet, but the Diet Squad brushes him aside like a crumb.

Ignoramus demands his pound of flesh: FICI DELENDAE SUNT!

Tree-felling trolls echo the digital chorus: THE FIGS MUST BE DESTROYED!

And by association those who wish to save the figs must be demonised as do-gooders or tree-huggers or greenies or loonies and ratbags or nutters or worse: WHINGERS, climate-change freaks, progress deniers, main-lining rail lovers and noisy low-life lefty minorities who don’t know their place: NEWCASTLE.

But it is their place, and the trolls secretly know it, but truth to a troll is a falsehood feast. They’re inciters of what they claim to hate, and they unwittingly become what they claim to oppose, a minority masquerading as a majority, and so do we all on this fateful day.

Is not Ignoramus within each of us on both sides of the barricades?

I howl like a banshee as death and his minions sharpen their blades before the condemned.

And I smell that smell again.

I smell what I cannot see beyond the Dawson Street picket.

This whole affair stinks, but it’s not simply the genius loci, my dear chap, or the sweet perfume of yet another injunction, it’s more the smell of NEWS, North, East, West, South:

I can smell a good story from whatever direction, round up the seemingly random facts into a bleating RAM herd of your Ciceronian screen text, follow a hot or cold scent on any true bearing, but, on this occasion, my dear chap: I NEED SHERLOCK.

‘OH, the senators are rapt, Sam, you have them squirming in their togas now!’ Cicero literally jumps onto the keyboard in his excitement. ‘This oration is really finding itself, but who, in the name of Romulus and Remus, my dear fellow, is Sherlock?’

V

The long-haired green man with a megaphone urges the crowd to be peaceful.

Lily, the feisty Maltese terrier, distracts a security guard while a willowy flower child climbs a tree. She snaps her resistance padlock on a liberating branch of Foucault. Does she not know that the figs are dangerous, just waiting to kill passing humans?

It must be so, because Ignoramus has said it.

Like a troll booth without a Fee there are surely no ulterior motives or Gallo-Roman paradoxes here in La Man Street as a little girl faints at the sight of authoritarian ignorance on the march.

Patriarchal power for power’s sake as a female doctor rushes to the little girl’s aid, only to be pushed aside by the very uniform uniformed dullard who pumped me back to life.

Karma!

NICE BUTTOCKS, my dear boy, I murmur, though I confess he perceives my cheeky compliment as a snarling growl and leaps back accordingly like a startled cat.

‘Enough,’ Cicero hisses. ‘I am not typing startled cat!’

It’s enough for me too, my dear boy.

In response to my growl, the Diet Squad reach for their luncheons, and capsicum is definitely on the menu, so I dash madly around the entire block as though I’m Heracles circling Troy in my four-legged chariot, or some tail-wagging pagan, completely God-free, or a Grecian-helmeted Anglican riding my bicycle for the sheer hell of it, academic gown flowing freely in a singlet-and-sandal lap of honour for a synodic life well-pedaled.

Down Dawson Street I go, left into the council car park, and then a mad dash past the Cooks Hill Bookshop in a blur of forgotten book club memories before I streak past the Darby Street picket to the cheers of the Save Our Figs crew, onward into Civic Park past the hideous oh so public council chamber pots until one last mad dash for the redeeming waters of Margel Hinder’s Captain Cook Fountain in a chaste and virtuous manner.

‘Verbosity is a poor cousin to eloquence, my dear fellow.’ Cicero frowns. ‘It must be the dog in you! Keep it simple, Sam. Cave canem!’

My opus ends, my dears, in the waters of the Captain Cook Fountain where I find Sherlock practising his backstroke.

Sherlock is an obese beagle with a fat nose for detection, and I’m a thin Alpine dingo red cattle cross with an even fatter nose for arboreal news, a real Novocastrian newshound, you might say!

I commission Sherlock to investigate the source of what I could smell from the other side of the council barricade but could not see.

And then I dash from the fountain like a mad thing and shake fons Bandusiae all over a passing policeman, not a member of the Diet squad by the look of him, a discerning rotunda of a chap with a beer-belly wit even when soaked. I hear him say to a fellow policeman:

I wish we weren’t here because the real criminals are over there.

So I head over there, nose to the ground, eyes closed for greater olfactory focus, only to smell a rat: Ignoramus. He is talking on his mobile phone, dear boy, brazenly standing in the shade of a condemned fig, and clearly confident that the only one in earshot is a dumb dog.

To my horror, he sits down beside me, patting me on the head, as he continues his conversation.

Why are you such an authoritarian anus? I growl.

Anus has such a nice ring to it etymologically speaking, but the meaning is lost on this vacuous fellow, my dear.

Perhaps my canine Latin accent confuses him because he just keeps patting me on the head and talking on his phone as if I’d never asked the question.

You may think I’m verbose, my dear fellow, but I know when I’m not really being heard, and I know when to listen.

And listen I do to this posturing posterior!

Stay virtuous, I say to myself, as arboreal poison drips from his tongue. Stay virtuous!

I hear the distant sound of the chainsaws and the scream of the crowd: SHAME, SHAME, SHAME!!

And then they scream: THE LIGHTS ARE STILL ON!! THE LIGHTS ARE STILL ON!!

But I fear that the lights of true representative democracy just went out, my dear fellow.

The Roman Republic is dead.

The darkness of the dictatorship is upon us.

VI

‘So what is he saying, dear chap?’ Cicero is beside himself. ‘Release the beast from the bestiary, Sam. Your audience is back in the palm of your paw, but don’t overplay it, dear boy. The senators are restless! What is Ignoramus saying?’

He’s saying:

‘I am Deus Conflictus, a god from the underworld, imagined son of Pluto. I inspire human conflict and ignorance. And I do it so well: a whisper to the right, a whisper to the left, a shout to the middle and all are bereft!! Ha! Ha! Ha!’

‘No offence intended, dear boy, but he sounds like a sick puppy,’ Cicero observes, ‘and admittedly god is dog walking backwards, but why would a god use a mobile phone, and who is he talking to in this godless black spot?’

His followers, I guess. The sort who believe in demonising THE OTHER, those who believe in POWER OVER rather than POWER SHARED, the ‘winners and losers’ brigade, my dear fellow, the ‘end justifies the means’ crew, anonymous trolls of every persuasion for whom EMPATHY is a form of leprosy threatening their rampant yet androgynous manhood and for whom UNITY is a cold spoon against their divisive, carnal certainties!

These faithful followers of Ignoramus view their own opinions as majority facts while the conflicting facts of THE OTHER are clearly outrageous minority opinions.

No matter how loudly they may shout THE OTHER down, the disciples of Ignoramus are always the silent majority opposing a noisy minority, in their mendacious minds, at least!

And as for the mobile phone, my dear, could such a god ignore an omnipresent purveyor of pooled ignorance and social conflict?

‘So what is he saying now?’ Cicero asks.

He’s saying:

‘You are hearing the throb of the chainsaws and the shriek of the shredder, but the figs are already dead, and they are consigned by me to the underworld.

Only those godless fools in SAVE OUR FIGS could deny this hyper reality.

I have captured the spirit of unity in community, the tree spirit of Newcastle, and I have killed it!

Ha! Ha! Ha! Three cheers for me!’

‘He sounds like a malignant narcissist, my dear boy.’ Cicero shakes his head. ‘And he really believes he’s a god?’

And then two kookaburras land in search of worms. Did you know that they mate for life, my dear chap? I’m tempted to grant them three laps of the park, but their beaks and general attitude are a little more problematic than those of a chook. And they’re hunting to feed their chicks who are squawking in their nest, which is high in a fig tree opposite the Cultural Centre.

‘Breaking News, I’m sure.’ Cicero yawns. ‘But when you interrupt …’

I cannot interrupt such vital parental employment, my dear fellow, not this late in their breeding season, and I respect their erudite intelligence in living near a library. They clearly value literacy and education, my dear chap. Besides, I’ve been observing them from the Dawson Street picket for weeks, and they now feel like family from a Save Our Figs perspective.

‘And this feels like another annoying digression!’ Cicero sighs. ‘Not every digression is a good digression! You were telling the noble senators of the words of Ignoramus.’

Well, Ignoramus is now saying:

‘I’m the true victim here. There’s nothing wrong with the figs, but there’s something wrong with me. And what’s mortally wrong with me is my divine rightness.

I am a victim of my own infallibility.

Those left-wing loonies from Save Our Figs and Save Our Rail and Save Our Underpants, or whatever, know I’m right. That’s why they protest so much!

I propose, they oppose. It’s like cats and dogs, really!’

No, not really, I interject, but all he hears is a canine whimper.

And all I can think is what a fine friendship you and I share, my dear fellow. Cats and dogs, indeed!

And as I watch the kookaburras take off, wriggling worms in their beaks, I’m reminded of what can be achieved when left and right wings cooperate.

‘I create, they berate!’ Ignoramus continues, my dears. ‘In years to come, my statue will stand where these figs stand today, and people will acknowledge that I was humble enough to accept my own visionary genius. And that I was strong enough in my godhead to oppose opponents of change.’

I want to throw up, my dear boy, but all I can manage is a dry retch.

The world may change, I eventually scream at him, but it does not necessarily progress.

But he experiences my screaming protest as me drooling on his hand, my dears.

And all the while he is patting me on the head.

I feel like Hitler’s Blondie, my dear boy.

I’d prefer to forget, but I do recall what Ignoramus says next on the anal end of his mobile phone:

‘I have a vision of what this city wants to become, and eventually a future majority will agree with me. In the meantime, I must protect democracy from itself. Sometimes it is necessary to destroy democracy to save democracy. I am the divine patron of SOD, Save Our Democracy.’

Be kind, I whisper to Ignoramus, but all he hears is a bitter whine, and then he says:

‘These “unhealthy” healthy figs must be destroyed to teach these left-wing loonies that there’s no place in a decent democracy for their contrary opinions, no matter how majority their minority opinions may be.’

Perhaps the concept of kindness is too foreign for his cruel consciousness to comprehend, my dear boy, because my whispered whining seems to launch him into a major meltdown risk-rant:

‘Even healthy trees are inherently dangerous. Just imagine THE INSURANCE RISK of trees falling and leaves floating like airborne assassins! Unacceptable!! A life without risk is the only life worth risking! Next I shall inspire risk-averse councillors to extend my insurance argument to Blackbutt Reserve. Bulldoze the lot, I say, in favour of safety-conscious development and endless community conflict. Let them form SOB, Save Our Blackbutt, because SOB they will as the trees come down. That’ll show all tree-hugging greenies and NIMBY WHINGERS that I’m the god in charge! And just think of the budget windfall for council from Blackbutt Estate sales. Perhaps we could drain the ocean and build there too. That’d fix the shark problem! And the risk of drowning would be mitigated. Guided democracy, that’s what Newcastle needs! Democracy guided by me And as for Save Our Figs, just to rub their green noses in SOD, I’ll see to it that the Hills Figs killed in Laman Street are replaced with Hills Figs! Ha! Ha! Ha! Three cheers for me!’

I look up at him in silent wonder. How can a god be barking up so many wrong trees?

Why is this authoritarian anus so committed to dividing the community rather than uniting it?

Where is love? I ask. Where is it hiding in this city?

Where is empathy?

Where is environmental responsibility in the face of climate change?

When I look up at him again, he is gone.

Was he ever there, I wonder?

And then I hear my master’s very worried, very unBuddhist call, questioning the moral legitimacy of my birthright, my dear chap, and I run back obediently to place my head in the canine noose once more.

VII

And now I find myself on a 233 bus heading for town at dusk with that author who wants to tell the story of the figs through my mouth. He has convinced my master to let him take me for a walk, and he has convinced the rather sceptical bus driver that I am a guide dog.

‘You were my guide, philosopher and friend,’ he says.

Where are we going, my dear chap? I ask. Horseshoe Beach? I will not chase sticks, my dear boy, I will not chase sticks!

‘Clearly he’s mistaken you for somebody else,’ Cicero suggests.

And now he’s saying: ‘Does it bring it all back?’

What on earth is he talking about?

‘Why don’t you ask him, old boy?’ Cicero urges.

I am asking him, my dear, but all he can hear is my frustrated barking.

‘There you go,’ he says. ‘Your bark is still modulated at a decibel level perfectly pitched to reach all ears on the bus.’

WHO WAS I? I bark, and bark, and bark.

‘Shut the f*** up, you mongrel!’ the driver shouts at me.

It is a very tense, ill-conceived transport interchange, my dear fellow, the sort of thing you might experience in the back streets of Wickham rather than on a 233 in Hunter Street, but, if I’m not mistaken, we’re approaching my old bus stop!

I growl at the antiquated bus barbarian as I literally disemBARK, my dear fellow, to drag the author up Wolfe Street at the behest of two white doves. Not as much fun as chook-chasing, my dear, but I know I’m going home to the bestiary even though I do not know how I know this, or why my former home in my former life was called the bestiary.

And for the first time in this dog’s life I fetch a stick from under my old frangipani tree only to be mocked by a blasted ghost for failing to pick it up first go. Oh, the humiliation, my dear fellow!

Good evening, Henderson, I growl, though why I say this to the ghost I have no idea. Where can I find a good exorcist? Damn and blast!

But I proceed to pick up my golden bough, and I immediately sense where I’m going.

Undercover journalism is no stranger in the shadows, my dear boy, but underworld journalism is literally beneath me.

It is dark when the author finally drops me back at Gibson Street.

I find Sherlock hiding in the thunderbox with my consensually chased chooks. I assure them that the great detective will do them no moral harm, my dear, and then I listen to his breathless report.

That which I could smell beyond the barricade but could not see is a vicious brute of a guard dog named Cerberus. It is said that he has three heads, and serpents for a mane, and a drooling countenance …

‘The Woodward and Bernstein of tree journalism you may be, my dear fellow, but this is a deep throat of thrice-gargantuan proportions!’ Cicero swishes his bushy tail after receiving my contemporary report of Sherlock’s findings. ‘Are you sure Sherlock is right?’

He is always right about the dog in the night!

‘The best sleeping potion for a dumb dog is intelligence.’ Cicero smiles. ‘My feline bark shall be worse than Cerberus’ bite, my dear boy. I shall whip him to sleep like an oratorical cat of nine tales! And once he is dog-dozing, you’ll be free to sneak past his hideous presence to interview the figs.’

What a great idea, my dear fellow! What a scoop! I, Newcastle’s finest investigative tree journalist, will interview the condemned.

‘It will be the greatest news story ever orated by a Novocastrian newshound, my dear boy,’ Cicero asserts, ‘inspired by mew!’

And thus it was that we proceed past the tents of the Save Our Figs protesters on this cold and blustery evening at the intersection of Dawson and Laman Streets only to be confronted by Charon the ferry dog in his rather incomprehensible American accent.

Charon escaped from the USS Charlotte during a goodwill visit to Newcastle. He literally jumped ship.

‘Where in hell did he get a name like Charon?’ Cicero enquires.

Well, that involves his curriculum vitae, if you will, or should that be curriculum mortis, in his particular case?

After graduating from the university’s Faculty of Death, and, yes, his rather low-fat, utilitarian retail degree was really on the nose, my dear, he eventually became a sniffer dog with Transport NSW, and there’s a lot of dead wood to sniff in that department.

Anyway, upon his retirement from professional sniffing, and a short stay in the pension pound, he re-emerged as a nameless rescue dog, and, as fate would have it, his new master seconded him back to Transport NSW as a companion animal for elderly Stocktonites at death’s door on the Stockton ferry.

It was said that his Bachelor of Rigor Mortis made him uniquely qualified for the task. They may not have known his name, but his degree was entirely recognisable by the tattered remains of his academic gown, which could serve as a shroud for the entire concept of tertiary education, my dear fellow.

And it was on the Stockton ferry that he was renamed Charon, my dear chap, and he became a ship mascot once more. Full karmic circle, my dear, in accord with Transport NSW timetabling, or should I say simple harmonic oscillation rather than circle?

In his case, more simple than harmonic!

Going backwards and forth to Stockton ad infinitum has now led him to a rather inharmonious and tautologically discordant obsession with the River Styx.

Charon sees that blasted river everywhere, but we must humour him, my dear boy, because he’s seeing it now as the rain creates a mere trickle across Laman Street.

VIII

‘HALT!’ Charon howls, as only a retired bloodhound with a good industry super package can howl. ‘I do not smell DEATH! It’s sinful to carry LIVING beings on my boat. I made that mistake before with you, Satan, and that callous council dog-catcher who tried to steal Cerberus from my Lord and Master!’

So there we stand on the bank of the River Styx: me in my official PRESS jacket since I’m working this evening at the behest of the god of news; Satan, the blackest of all hellhounds with a loving, eloquent heart; Cicero, the great Maine Coon orator; sitting atop Alexander the Great (Dane); and Barabbas; the tearful German shepherd with a shady criminal history that is almost biblical.

I know what the noble senators are thinking, my dear chap. Why is this devilish denouement such a stag show? Where are all the females, by gad? Was there not one fair doggo maiden who would accompany us into the underworld?

Well, I did invite Mother Teresa, but she said that she wouldn’t be seen dead with Satan, and she opted to pray for us instead. Be that as it may, but Satan proves to be more useful than Mother Teresa on this particular occasion due to his ungodly familiarity with the hellish fare collection system of Transport NSW.

‘Sam carries the Golden Opal Card,’ Satan says.

I grip the golden bough firmly in my teeth and wave it so vigorously that frangipani blossoms fall at Charon’s feet.

Guided by this wand of destiny, and his previous Transport NSW training, Charon allows our esteemed travelling party of four live canines and one live feline onto his rather dead and imaginary boat for $2.50 return.

It’s a bargain, by gad! EveryBODY else is paying Death (incl GST).

Scarcely do we board then we deBARK on the other side of the black Stygian trickle.

Cerberus senses our presence as we approach the Dawson Street barricade in Laman Street. He begins to howl from his cavern, and the heart on my fur trembles.

His thrice-throated baying echoes through the Novocastrian night. They have fashioned a cave for the vicious brute out of the amputated limbs of the first four mortally wounded figs. He howls from a bed of freshly-slaughtered sawdust. He is completely devoid of empathy for the weeping figs around him.

I experience a sudden rush of blood from my past life: WHO WAS I? I howl in unison with Cerberus, momentarily creating a beast with four heads.

There is no answer in this paradoxical street of questions.

And then you stand majestically on your back legs, my dear fellow, with your bushy tail serving as a senatorial toga and your front legs gesticulating in true histrionic Roman fashion.

Alexander the Great (Dane) maintains a stoic stillness, made all the more remarkable with your cat claws anchored in his back, to grant you an oratorical stability that you rarely display due to your tendency to leap from foot to foot or to stretch your claws on the nearest piece of furniture when aspiring to eloquence.

Your first CATiline oration is being delivered while standing on the shoulders of a giant, my dear boy:

Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patienta nostra?

The soporific impact of your oratory on Cerberus is almost instant. It is as if your raspy tongue has suddenly become smooth.

The monster sleeps as Satan and I use Barabbas as a vaulting horse to leap over the barricade, creep past the hideous hound’s thrice-throated snores, and make our way to the front of the Cultural Centre.

I sprinkle myself with rain water, and I plant my golden bough on a copy of the Proserpine Herald, which had been discarded by a passing Philistine under the very gaze of Him and Her.

I look up briefly at these two emaciated, backlit, bronze figures that guard the arched entry to the Elysian Fields. The constructive and timely eye of the Cyclops on the Town Hall battlements is blinking through the fractured foliage. I think of Adam and Eve and the chaste virtue of fig leaves.

And then, my dear boy, Satan and I make a mad canine dash to enable me to interview those whom the proverbial ‘noisy left-wing minority of NIMBY, TREE-HUGGING WHINGERS’ might call ‘those who had been condemned to die on a false accusation’ as Virgil once wrote.

A chilly windborne rain is now driving into our faces. I think immediately of Ceres who instituted winter amidst a stolen Proserpine grief that could make Barabbas look jovial. That kidnapper Pluto has so much to answer for: climate change will be the death of us all, I tell you! Those dirty, stinking coal ships!!

And, as if on cue, an anachronistic collier bellows from the port below. Satan smiles, and it occurs to me for the very first time that he too might be gay, but the most noteworthy interview in my life must take precedence over a possible dalliance in hell, my dears.

The figs have deployed what weaponry they possess, but a bitter taste that would repel a hungry giraffe is no deterrent to chainsaws, my dear boy.

I bear witness that these Laman Street figs are well and truly rooted as they share with me such a vision of Newcastle that would make proponents of change weep for conservatism.

I am both elated and saddened by their sobbing prophecy.

Much of the interview is conducted by snout. It is via this olfactory mechanism that I am able to confirm Satan’s prior claim that the figs are ‘fourteen living as one’, for the unwounded are sending subterranean nutrients and comfort to their wounded fellows.

The tree spirit is still alive in Newcastle. JUST.

If only the god of news could hold sway over Ignoramus to preserve this precious arboreal spirit of growth through unity, but Ignoramus is dedicated to killing what others love, especially unity.

As I bid my journalistic farewells, promising to reveal their last ficulneus vision in the greatest news story ever told by me, I realise how much I do love these figs and how much I love what they represent to those who love them.

Satan guides me to a secret and rather cheeky SOF buttock gate in the wire barricade near those hideous council chamber pots.

A windblown security light reveals that some unknown wag has written TUSK TUSK FALSE DREAMS over an image of a proposed memorial plaza that has been affixed to the hidden SOF gate.

We have not forgotten that we are dogs, my dear boy, so we piss on the gate of false dreams before making our departure from the underworld.

Just a little urinary wake-up call for Cerberus, my dear fellow!

And, as we scramble through this ivory gate of falsehood to the upper world, the wintry summer rain of Ceres continues to weep for what is to come.

IX

And now the killing begins in earnest.

The rain pours down as though the heavens are weeping.

Smiling men in sackcloth suits oversee the slaughter from a square office with curved walls. They are patting each other on the back and drawing lots in the shadows to decide who among them is most responsible for this magnificent Pyrrhic victory.

The defeated protesters are defiant still, sobbing and chanting simultaneously: SHAME! SHAME! SHAME!

A grinning digital figure, cloaked in predictable anonymity, strolls through the grieving, angry crowd as though on a socially networked victory laptop around the Circus Maximus: FICI DELENDAE SUNT! FICI DELENDAE SUNT! THE FIGS MUST BE DESTROYED! THE FIGS MUST BE DESTROYED!

I growl at this truculent troll, and the grin slowly slides from its wicked face. If only this fool could know what I know from the portentous prophecy of the figs.

Winners are grinners in the world of Ignoramus, and nobody grins as broadly as this laptop LOSER, but even a member of the Diet Squad has had enough of defending the indefensible. He orders this particular grinning idiot to leave the protesters alone.

Credit where credit is due, my dear. I lick the hand of this Diet Squad lad in appreciation of his noble and kind gesture.

‘LOSER? Is this not the vitriol of a tree-hugging troll?’ Cicero snaps. ‘Are you not a hypocrite, my dear fellow?’

And he is right, damn his raspy tongue.

The more I’ve studied conflict in the ancient world, my dear boy, the more I’ve come to hate it.

‘I love it!’ Cicero chortles.

When I think of all the birds and lizards on your conscience, oh feline assassin, I …

‘I have no conscience,’ Cicero declares. ‘And what of your lust for lamb cutlets?’

It is true, my dear, that I eat the Lamb of God. You and I had ‘kill or die’ stamped on our buttocks at birth, my dear fellow, but I’ll have you know that I was chairman of the Committee of Conscience in support of Vietnam draft dodgers, and yet the more I oppose conflict the more conflicted I become.

‘Stop opposing it then,’ Cicero advises. ‘Accept who you are. And continue to forget who you were!’

You may be right, my dear boy, but my spiritual conundrum is: I have two feet in the pagan forest, one in a Buddhist temple and the other in Christ Church Cathedral.

I even considered becoming a priest in my former life, but how I know this I do not know. Damn and blast!

Jesus said: Blessed are the peacemakers. And yet I begin to fear that conflict may be a necessary catalyst for the creation of a newer world without conflict.

Can one be a past or present warrior for future peace?

What would Jesus do?

And just as I entertain this question, another fig is consigned to the shredder as though it were the biggest petition in NSW history.

And, at that very moment, the rain ceases, and a shaft of light from the heavens illuminates the shredder as a large bird’s nest is unwittingly consigned to its fate.

The crowd gasps, but the workers are oblivious as the female kookaburra dives from on high to follow her chicks into bloody oblivion.

And I have my answer.

‘Did not Christ accept crucifixion rather than lash out at those who would kill him?’ Cicero postulates.

But I’m not Christ, my dear boy. I’m a dog.

And, yes, once a dogfight starts I embrace the very conflict that I oppose with canine passion.

I fight to overcome what is evil, and I become the very troll that I oppose. I look across at the other side of the barricade, and I see myself as if in a mirror. And I bark and bark and bark. I growl at my own reflection.

‘So you’re no different to those you oppose!’ Cicero smirks.

NO, my dear fellow, NO! I am different.

I fight for a world without barriers, whereas my opposing reflection fights to maintain barriers.

My mirror image is a MORON, my dear boy. In the heat of battle, howling at the barricade, calling a MORON a MORON seems like a higher truth rather than verbal vitriol.

Is telling truth to power a violent act?

‘You tell me, you’re the budding pacifist!’ Cicero stretches his claws on my master’s computer chair with not a thought for the damage done. ‘But what of the role of education …?’

Not even a classical education can dent my opposing moron’s commitment to conflict and division, my dear boy, to winning and losing at all costs.

I, on the other hand, fight for whatever will remove the barriers that separate us.

I fight to restore unity in community: SAVE OUR FIGS! SAVE OUR FIGS!

‘But why do you not simply let the figs be crucified in accord with Christ’s example?’ Cicero persists. ‘Why fight to prevent the subsequent resurrection?’

I envy Christ, my dear boy, for HE wasn’t a Christian … but just as I say this, my dears, I do give up the fight, and I allow the remaining figs to be crucified.

‘Ah, so you’ve finally remembered your audience’, Cicero purrs. ‘Bread and circuses, that’s what your audience wants, my dear. They crave distraction. They lust for blood! Release your beast from the bestiary, Sam. Passion! Passion! There’s only so much Anglican incense …’

Nevertheless, I stand witness, like an apostle at the foot of the cross, a protester without protest.

‘Or a whited sepulcher, my dear,’ Cicero berates. ‘You sanctimonious wanker!’

And when only the last branch of the last fig is left reaching for the heavens it is momentarily occupied by the male kookaburra.

He is clearly distressed.

He drops a wiggling worm from his beak, and he lets forth a cry of despair that proclaims what all of us are feeling.

Where is God?

And yet there is a god in Laman Street.

Ignoramus.

My thoughts swirl in an angry cloud of grief. Tears etch a map of despair on the willowy flower child and the green man beside me. Questions are all I am left with:

Are we all responsible for the death of this kookaburra family?

Are we each responsible for every conflict no matter what side we claim to be on, and no matter how neutral we may claim to be?

Is collective responsibility for everything part of our individual birthright?

Laughter has been assassinated.

The male kookaburra circles overhead as the last branch of the last fig is shredded.

And the questions keep circling in the cathedral of my mind like unanswered prayers:

Are we each responsible for climate change no matter how environmentally responsible we as individuals may be?

Is there a form of democracy in collective consciousness that makes the minority as responsible for the majority’s decision as the majority?

That night, after the fourteen figs have been reduced to dying stumps, my master takes me for a walk in Cooks Hill.

I hear the chatter of asylum seekers in the trees above my head as we stroll down Council Street.

I find the male kookaburra dead in the gutter.

Perhaps he died of a broken heart.

A lot has been broken in Newcastle this day, and no amount of rational argument will ever fix it.

And, as if on cue, some utter MORON smashes a beer bottle outside of a terrace where an archivist and an artist once lived. It is that very same digital LOSER clutching his victory laptop in one hand while breaking glass with the other.

Followers of Ignoramus are celebrating the deaths of the Laman Street figs. These disciples of division are laughing at the grief of the SOF protesters. They have rigged fairy lights in the Council Street figs and are chanting: FICI DELENDAE SUNT! FICI DELENDAE SUNT!

I put my tail between my legs.

I follow my master into the deeper darkness of surrounding streets.

Could there be a deeper darkness?

X

Yes, my dears, mark my words, Laman Street will be the ghost who walks in this city for a very long time.

I ought to know because I’m standing in the Skull Cave pretending to be Devil, the Phantom’s companion wolf. The devil of Wolfe Street comes to mind. The media love it. An Alpine dingo red cattle cross Devil.

A man named Dietmar is holding aloft his painting of the Phantom dashing across Laman Street in a wintry rain. The Ghost Who Walks is dressed as Mr Walker, and his devilish companion is loping beside him on the canvas, though it must be admitted that my loping days are sadly over. The ghostly figs can clearly be seen in the painting.

And perhaps they are ghosts now, my dears! It has been over five human years since they died! And in dog years, well, it’s best not to think about it. I’m like an ancient manuscript, my dears, more dog-ears than I care to remember, and a ghost dictating my every word.

What is it about me and ghosts, my dear boy? By gad, I’m haunted, my dear fellow, absolutely haunted! Damn and blast!

You should have seen the look on Satan’s face when I told him I was to be Devil at the media launch of the Phantom Show. Pure envy, my dear, green with sulphurous jealousy.

Anyway, I leave the Art Gallery, finally feeling seen for who I am not, and I realise that Newcastle is suffering from the same malaise.

Too many urban adolescents are determined to create a new heritage in their own imagined adult image, conceived by a socially networked and liberally lubricated need to be seen for what they are not while ripping down the old heritage as too organic, too low-rise Victorian, too humble, too invisible, not lucrative enough, too socialist, too real, too unlike every other city on earth, TOO OLD, my dear.

‘Just like you,’ Cicero hisses.

Ah. Now it is true that I’m in the crematorium holding pen, my dear fellow, but there is life in the old dog yet.

‘But no new tricks, I fear,’ Cicero admonishes. ‘You can’t handle change, can you?’

I can’t stand change for change’s sake, my dear, especially change driven by greed, poor planning and the fanning of our convict fear of the judgment of others.

We have an inherited fear of rejection, the worst of the convict worst, and that fear can be so easily manipulated by the apostles of Mammon.

We can’t stay as a town of indigenous cooking fires or colonial tents, but we need to evolve organically in accord with our own evolving vision and belief in ourselves rather than succumb to the manipulative rhetoric of the ‘we’re not good enough’ brigade, whether that rhetoric is from within or without.

‘If we’re not good enough, who is?’ Cicero asks.

Haven’t you heard? Newcastle is the new Sydney, my dear boy, which is why it needs a Light Rail that it doesn’t need, and tourists that it doesn’t need.

‘Steady on, mind your blood pressure,’ Cicero trills.

And to attract the tourists we need a NEW high-rise city to make them feel at home. We can’t have the tourists thinking they’re away from home when they’re actually away from home, my dear. That would never do.

‘Remember what the vet said?’ Cicero warns.

Oh, bugger the vet, my dear fellow. Why can’t we Novocastrians simply enjoy living in Newcastle without having to share the experience with thousands of total strangers who will ruin the experience?

Why do we never question our need for external approval?

Why not just get on with living in this city rather than be driven by a desire to be seen by others to be living?

‘I don’t know, you tell me,’ Cicero urges, ‘but don’t blow your brain up … the vet said …’

Oh, screw the wretched vet, my dear fellow.

I tell you that tourism is the answer to a question that most Novocastrians have never asked.

The greed and political hubris driving that answer makes me want to vomit, my dear, but don’t get me started, for what could be more Novocastrian than a Brett Whiteley sculpture of an egg in a bird’s nest?

‘The university downgrading classics, perhaps?’ Cicero quips.

Don’t wind me up, my dear fellow. By gad, they’re turning the place into a trade school, but the appalling ignorance of outrageous fools who don’t learn from history leads to a kookaburra nest being replaced by this … by this … and then I see him.

‘Him?’ Cicero asks.

Exactly. I sniff at his rather low-slung buttocks. Who are you, my dear?

They call me Maximus. My master named me after a Roman gladiator.

You don’t look like Russell Crowe.

But he does look like a rather cute tan-and-white miniature foxie chihuahua cross. Very foxy indeed, my dear. If I were younger, I’d invite him to the old Centurion Wine Bar, and I’d show him …

‘Blood pressure,’ Cicero murmurs. ‘Blood pressure.’

That too, my dear. That too! So I show him around the glorified car park that Laman Street has now become. Even the council workers refer to it as ‘fifty shades of grey’. And some of the old SOF crew think of it as Tiananmen Square.

Have you heard about Pooper Cars? Maximus asks. I’m excited. Vrrroom vrroom!

I have an immediate vision of our backyard Tiberian thunderbox on wheels, my dear fellow, with our consensually chased chooks pulling me to a chaste and moral victory.

They’re to race around the East End to see how much damage they can do, a grinning Maximus says. It should be great!

Hundreds of trees cut down, cementing and tarring the Foreshore Park, old heritage buildings cracking, engines screaming, eardrums bursting, residents pitted against hoons, and if we’re truly lucky someone will get killed or maimed or one of the pooper cars might explode and cover the entire East End in shit!

That’ll really put Newcastle on the international map!

It’ll be on CNN!

Can you imagine it?

I’m afraid I can, my dear. But why do insurance companies allow Pooper Cars while declaring fig trees to be dangerous?

I’m a lover of sports, with the possible exception of greyhound racing and horse-racing, my dear fellow, but sporting events kill and maim far more people, and other animals like you and me, than trees!

And trees protect us from climate change.

So, answer my question, you young bogan!

XI

Did you not hear me, my dear fellow?

Why do insurance companies allow Pooper Cars while declaring fig trees to be dangerous?

Maximus looks at me in wonder as though I’m Belka or Strelka from Sputnik 5.

He cannot contemplate my love of open space and trees from within his rather overdeveloped and architecturally boxed brain.

But I know the one-word answer to my question:

IGNORAMUS.

The god of conflict divides and conquers in this city. He likes nothing better than Novocastrians at each other’s throats, and so does Maximus, apparently. His master has already bought him a discount canine Pooper ticket, or so he says.

‘Since when does a dog need a ticket to poop?’ Cicero laughs. ‘You’ve been freely pooping all over this city for years.’

Well, be that as it may, but what a loathsome disappointment is young Maximus! I blame lack of a classical education, my dear boy. Oh well! Vrrroom vrroom, indeed!

I can’t wait to see who wins the bronze pooper, Maximus says, as if to affirm my admittedly intellectually snobbish assessment of his finer qualities.

But what of the impact on the East End residents? I ask, with a minimus of expectation, my dear fellow.

They’re just a bunch of NIMBY whingers! Precious, elite, rich bastards they are! They should all get over themselves, and suck it up for Newcastle!

NIMBY whingers?

Well, you called me a bogan!

But you are a bogan, my dear, and they’re not just whingers! They have a legitimate complaint. And quite a few of them are poor and living in public housing. What’s precious about that?

Yeah, but think of the new infrastructure they’re getting! Footpaths, new road surfaces, new drainage, new grandstands, new sewerage pipes …

Well, considering their lounge rooms might be full of poop, they might appreciate the new sewerage pipes, but not at the expense of their lifestyles, and their hearing, my dear boy. Not to mention their mental health.

And why should some East End businesses suffer so that Pooper Cars can make private profit from public funds?

I’d be proud to have a pooper car land in my lounge room, right next to my basket. That’d be cool! Talk about private profit!

Why do you have to kill what others love, to have what you love?

You mean the trees. Calm yourself. We’ll plant new ones. More shade, like the Lord Mayor says.

I remember a different Lord Mayor who defended the figs, my dear.

A lot of us are too old to ever see these new trees and experience this new shade.

We loved the old trees. They were part of us, part of our wee-mail network, part of our personal heritage, part of what was being passed on from generation to generation, and I do mean passed on, my dear fellow, to the greatest urinary relief, and you and your kind killed them! It’s Laman Street all over again!

Are you a tree-hugger, or something? Only a tree-hugger cares about heritage. Look, we didn’t have time to do an archeological dig in Watt Street, and all that crap you lot go on about. Although I do like digging! But it would have delayed the race, and a few mouldy boomerangs that don’t come back or redcoat diaries in rusting tins from under Newcastle’s oldest street won’t be missed.

Even bones under there would be past their chewing date.

And if you think your Aboriginal friends care about heritage, just look at the post office. Jesus Christ! It’s become a garbage dump!

Your veiled racism is noted, my dear boy. So you expect Aboriginal people to clean up the mess made by homeless whites, presumably to show Aboriginal respect for white postal heritage, while the whites build a fast food outlet and a Pooper Cars track over black heritage.

Now, you’re playing the race card, mate. So predictable!

It’s you who’s playing the race card, my dear fellow, the Pooper Cars Race card, but why would a dog like you not care about indigenous heritage treasures being buried under poop due to an ill-advised race to prepare for the race?

Did you just call me a dog? That’s fighting talk, mate! And I’m named after a gladiator!

But you are a dog, my dear fellow, a tan-and-white miniature foxie chihuahua cross, to be precise.

What’s my colour got to do with it, you bloody racist, but the only treasure I care about is the bronze pooper, that’s new heritage, mate!

And the race will be worth a few damaged buildings and PRECIOUS wounded NIMBY egos.

And as for you losing a few PRECIOUS trees, we’re in Laman Street right now! Look at these new young figs replacing the old ones. I rest my case!

You have no case, you boofhead barbarian. Right race, wrong place!

Although, it must be said privately, my dears, that I truly believe it’s the wrong race from an environmental perspective, utterly unsustainable for a sustainable city.

Why not hold the race away from residential streets! I ask.

But that’s half the fun, mate, anticipating a crash into some poor bastard’s home! Don’t you get it?

Why do I feel like I’m bathing with the unwashed?

‘Ask him if the pooper cars will be followed by pooper scoopers.’ Cicero grins.

XII

I can take no more of the conversation with Maximus, my dears, so I walk away after reviewing the Whiteley in the customary urinary fashion. Only a council parking meter could have bested this moment in terms of live streaming!

I would have pissed on Ignoramus, my dear boy, but apparently his mooted bronze statue has not been installed yet. Sadly, the same cannot be said for the new figs that he promised.

And yet Ignoramus is in me.

And Ignoramus is in you too, my dears.

The truth is that Ignoramus hates himself as much as you and I hate ourselves because we are all Ignoramus in our collective consciousness.

In demonising Ignoramus I demonise myself. In pissing on Ignoramus I piss on myself. So why not educate Ignoramus instead?

Education is the key, my dears. Yet what could educate this Ignoramus within? Education is the antibiotic for ignorance, and experience is the greatest educator of all, but what experience could educate us to embrace that which unites rather than that which divides?

What experience could inspire us to build bridges rather than council barricades?

And then a passing bogan interrupts my thoughts. Perhaps Newcastle should be renamed Boganville. This particular bogan in an ill-fitting Sydney suit advises his wife that Laman Street looks so much tidier now. Tidier, controlled, SOULESS, I want to scream, but he’s entitled to his point of view, my dears.

I look around, and I see a sad place, a killing field, a sacred space desecrated, while this bogan admires an artificial reality resplendent: an egg in a bird’s nest without birds.

I howl and howl and howl like the wolf I am not!

The ill-suited bogan scurries away, and a kookaburra laughs from another day. I smile a sad doggo smile at the memory, but I cannot see the wood for the trees, my dears.

The ten new figs have been planted in vaults so that their roots will never disturb. Disturb what, I wonder, denial of climate change, the embrace of carbon poopers over carbon captors?

It seems that we can dig up infrastructure all over this city to make way for Pooper Cars, but not for the fourteen crucified figs in Laman Street.

And now these new young figs are condemned to a stunted life of solitary confinement, their roots never to communicate with each other, their canopies divided by invisible asymptotes.

The barricades are still here in Laman Street if you have eyes to see what lies beneath.

Lies beneath indeed!

Never again will an arboreal cathedral obscure the War Memorial Cultural Centre. This architecturally emaciated escapee from East Berlin commemorates the wall between us, my dears: a culture of conflict.

Lest we forget.

And I don’t forget as I walk away.

The ghost who walks never forgets.

‘Beautiful ending, Sam,’ Cicero purrs.

But it’s not the ending, my dear fellow. It is merely the advent of what is to come.

XIII

By gad, somebody has left a glass of Sanguis Bestiae from my bar in front of the Baptist Tabernacle in Laman Street. Blood of Christ, my dear boy! I immediately think of Bernie, the best friend a man could ever have, my dear fellow. What would Bernie give to meet Cicero, my dear chap, in full CATiline regalia?

‘The knowledge of who you were, perhaps?’ Cicero smiles and reveals an ironic pair of canines.

I’m not your dentist, old boy, but I’ll drink to your suggestion. This abandoned chalice would have been at the foot of the cross that once rested against this church, a twisted, tortuous cross, fashioned rather crudely from the severed limbs of a crucified fig. It was here that we held the funeral service and wake for the Laman Street trees.

I recall trying to dress well. One must wear the right coat, the right tie for the right occasion. What would be suitably funereal yet celebratory, my dear: my brown Senate suit, the Colours blazer, the Union jacket?

But then I recall that I’m a dog, my dear fellow, so I wear my very best canine outfit: I wear my heart on my fur.

And all the while Satan is hounding me about why he’s not allowed to attend. Well, regular churchgoers might be somewhat put off by Beelzebub sniffing at their buttocks or pissing on their pew, my dear boy. He has a weak bladder, you know, as well as an unfortunate tendency to mark his territorial ambitions as though they were urinary works of high distinction.

I enter the church on my lead.

Our master has even polished his head for the occasion. I see most of the ceremony mirrored in his very Buddhist pate due to the fact that my direct view is obscured by the bulk of that Diet Squad dullard who once saved my life and one of the sawyers who felled the figs.

My first inclination is to bite them, my dears, but then I realise that they are genuine mourners. The world is a paradox, my dear fellow, and a lady named Jacinta pats me on the head as though comprehending my consternation at suddenly seeing THE OTHER as THE SAME.

I’m struck by a moment in the eulogy when feedback from the sound system whines in such a manner as to transport us all back to the Dawson Street picket. The congregation laughs because it does sound like the SOF resistance alarm. And I’m hearing that alarm now, my boy. The whining in my ears is un … un … unbearable, I’m …

I’m having my first stroke in Laman Street, my dears, while lapping a very fine rustic red.

I blame that wretched vet for pointing the bone at my blood pressure, my dear boy, but my recovery is a miracle.

Like a good idea, I’m difficult to kill!

I do thank Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the holy family of cocker spaniels from Council Street for coming to convey their bedside blessings upon me. It is from them that I learn that the council intends to kill the figs in Council Street at the behest of an insurance company, undoubtedly at the further behest of Ignoramus.

So I broadcast this sickbed gripe to all risk miners, coal miners and their political fellow-travellers, my dear boy:

Ignoramus is seducing you to kill all life on earth! We can’t breathe money, and we can’t eat the cargo of a dirty, stinking coal ship. When will this tree-killing nightmare end?

Trees are part of the solution to our major existential risk: CLIMATE CHANGE. How does that major risk measure up to the minor risk of tripping on a tree root or being hit by a falling branch?

I bare my buttocks to those who would insure a coal mine or Pooper Cars while condemning an urban forest. TREES ARE NOT THE PROBLEM!

Choose God over Mammon, and I don’t mean Deus Conflictus!

You make my blood boil!

And my blood does keep boiling, my dears, long after the broadcast, because my second stroke occurs during a Pooper Cars race.

The noise of the race is unbearable, and I can only imagine what agonies the East End Pets Association must be suffering as my master rushes me to the emergency vets on his very Buddhist pushbike with doggo trailer.

We are halted at a security cordon by that very same Diet Squad dullard who once saved my life.

KARMA!

My master displays his Pooper Pass, which has been granted to him for being a religious counsellor to all perceived victims of the race. If only they knew that my current dog collar coupled with my previous Licentiate in Theology might qualify me for a similar role with respect to pooped-out peninsula pets!

‘Please, I beseech you!’ my master cries.

And then, the last words I hear, my dears:

‘I can let you through, mate, but not the dog. He doesn’t have his Pooper Pass. I’m sorry.’

And I’m sorry too, my dears, for I die an hour later, surrounded by bogans racing to the race!

Oh, the shame of it, my dear boy. I might have been saved, but this security cordon is fatal. I’ve been killed by a regrettable combination of Diet and Poop! Ultimately, I blame lack of a classical education, my dears.

And now I find myself back at the bestiary. I’m a blasted ghost, and sitting next to me is that shrieking blackguard Henderson.

The world I have just left now seems like a purgatory where one lives by denying life to others, kill or die, but, here, in this conflict-free, in-between reality, I have no choice but to listen to Henderson as though I were living in Parnell Place during the event that just killed me.

It feels like an eternal near-death experience in a finite safety zone. My own home, my place of peace, my bestiary is being utterly violated by a shrieking interloper of the pagan Presbyterian persuasion, my dears.

Now, I know what the noble senators are thinking, my dear fellow: if I’m a ghost, how can you be typing what I’m saying?

Well the ancient Egyptians knew a thing or two about cats. I once hypothesised that catish is the language of ghosts due to the cat goddess Bastet’s role as a guide to the dead. It is to my post hoc credit that your post mortem dialogue with me is unliving proof of my hypothesis. And to think there are those who wish to downgrade such classical studies! I shall haunt them, my dears, mark my words! I shall haunt them!

‘You’re haunting me now with this annoying digression, my dear fellow,’ Cicero chirps. ‘You are in the bestiary next to a fellow ghost.’

Ah yes! The bestiary! You are right, my dear fellow. You are right. I turn to Henderson since he is clearly dying to tell me, if you will pardon a living phrase being attributed to the dead, my dears, and I scream: WHO WAS I?

He shrieks at me: ‘I know who you were, you Bacchanalian beast, before you donned that ridiculous dog costume. You were …’

And then he is gone to his next life in mid-sentence, my dears.

I am alone.

Thankfully, peacefully alone.

QUIETLY ALONE in a pooper-free zone!

Utterly alone, my dears, an anonymous still point in a turning world, with a view of the eternal now.

XIV

The greatest news story ever told by me, Newcastle’s finest investigative tree journalist, is coming alive, which is more than I can say for me, my dears.

I don my spectral PRESS jacket to report on the view of the eternal now that the bestiary now affords me.

The past, present and future are converging in Newcastle, my dear boy, as the prophecy of the Laman Street figs finally comes to pass.

Here is the NEWS from TANNER TV:

The sea rise is much higher than anticipated.

The warming waters move into the city in chronological waves driven eventually by tropical cyclones.

The swollen Hunter River breaks its banks, and adds to the swirling mayhem while citizens literally swim for their lives.

The water invades where it will.

The city’s population is decimated, and there is talk around the world that humans may have to place themselves on the endangered species list.

The Hunter estuary islands are reborn, my dears, only to eventually drown as the Kooragang coal loaders slowly slide into the sea.

A rump of Stockton becomes a desperate, sandbagged island, facing the ancient perils of Atlantis.

Maryville, Carrington, Tighes Hill and Wickham are all inundated.

Nobbys is an island once more, and Fort Scratchley stands on the original headland unable to defend against this climatic invader.

Since all of the buildings in Honeysuckle and Newcastle West now have ground floors under water, and many buildings in the lower sections of the East End are similarly compromised, there is much opportunistic speculation about Newcastle becoming the new Venice of the Pacific with a gondola service to replace the Light Rail. It is claimed that the tourists will love it, until the insurance companies condemn the waterlogged buildings as being too dangerous.

There is a move to transform the city into an international diving Mecca, with snorkelling dives on the old Light Rail tracks tipped to be in great demand. But then the saltwater crocodiles arrive, and the diving industry takes a dive.

Economic recovery comes in the form of demolition jobs, and the city becomes a union town again, in more ways than one, my dears.

It is decided that all council decisions will now require a unanimous vote.

Greed, fear and division have had their day in this town.

The silence of the trolls of all persuasions, including me, my dears, is deafening, and the return of empathy is a welcome relief. That is not to say that minority and majority groups do not argue and campaign vigorously to attain a unanimous vote, but the need for unanimity creates a greater spirit of compromise where citizens value unity in community more than any other outcome that they might be seeking.

When unanimity cannot be reached then a proposal cannot proceed. It leads to a slower, more organic form of progress and urban growth, my dears, not unlike the growth pattern of trees in a forest.

Indeed, the new council calls for the reinstitution of the 1931 tree spirit in Newcastle.

Insurance companies now offer tree-planting bonuses to customers and credits to councils who promote a better environmental balance between buildings, infrastructure and parkland.

Ignoramus still tries to inspire his remnant followers that all of this democratic change is Utopian nonsense, and that climate change has already happened, so why bother planting trees, but Ignoramus is a pale shadow of his former self. His power is much diminished within most Novocastrians since the collective human consciousness that created him can equally uncreate him.

Ignoramus is last seen sobbing in a leaking rowboat outside of the courthouse. He is holding up a protest sign against the demolition of thousands of drowned buildings and homes. Deus Conflictus is now the divine patron of SOB: SAVE OUR BUILDINGS rather than SAVE OUR BLACKBUTT, and his three followers from a once-leading property group are crammed into the sinking boat with him.

The last great buildings to be demolished are the Civic Theatre and the City Hall.

Sadly, the NeW Space university building has already gone. Such a beautiful architectural wonder reduced to rubble, along with the old Nesca House, in a desperate attempt to form a seawall to protect the trees in Civic Park.

I Look Ahead, the seahorse said, and, as I look ahead, my dears, I witness the fulfillment of the second part of the figs’ prophecy:

Fourteen council FIGures stand in Laman Street as they proclaim the ten Hills figs to be freed from their vaults. They then take part in planting four more Hills figs in the grassland that Laman Street has now become. These new figs are strategically placed so as to enable fourteen Laman Street figs to once again form an arboreal cathedral and bring shade to the council chamber that the Cultural Centre has now become.

The night before they died, the fourteen original Laman Street figs revealed to me, in my exclusive interview, my dears, that they would be reincarnated and become the council: a Lord Mayor, twelve councillors and a general manager.

Perhaps reincarnation is the ultimate form of climate change. And climate change IS the educational experience that inspires Novocastrians to build bridges rather than council barricades.

Indeed, the local climate changes in every sense of the word, my dears. The trees are now in charge, and the tree spirit of Newcastle lives.

As I look at their smiling council FIGures, acknowledging the citizens gathered on this former dune beside the sea, I wonder if these fourteen reincarnated souls know who they were, like I do not, or did they drink from the waters of the River Lethe to be released from memory before their return to the sky’s vault?

I must consult with Virgil via that most laudable translation by W.F. Jackson Knight, my dears, to ascertain whether …

Copyright Paul F Walsh 2018

Postscript

Fici Delendae Sunt is a work of fiction that is inspired by perceived aspects of reality. It is also my homage to two souls who now live beyond our current reality.

I thank Susan Harvey, Dr Bernie Curran, Chad Watson, Matthew Ward, Sharon Healey and a host of unnamed humans and canines for research advice, editorial advice and/or inspiration. I also thank Merlin for her Maine Coon trilling throughout the entire creative journey. And I thank Bounce Design.

I acknowledge the following sources:

The Godfrey Tanner OPUS edited and designed by Matthew Ward, created courtesy of Newcastle University Students Association

Tanner TV by The Godfrey Tanner Society, filmed by Anthony Brennan

Cetus by The University of Newcastle

From Mud and Mosquitoes by The University of Newcastle

The Newcastle Herald: via news coverage of the Laman Street Figs et al

The Aeneid by Virgil, Penguin Classics, as translated by W. F. Jackson Knight

Cicero: First and Second Speeches against Catiline: Modern School Classics

Cicero and the Roman Republic by F.R. Cowell, a Pelican Book

Photograph of Sam wearing his heart on his fur by Jacinta Dalton with permission from Jacinta Dalton

Photograph of Sam at the Dawson Street picket by Simone De Peak with permission from the Newcastle Herald, Simone De Peak and Chad Watson

Photograph of Sam in Laman Street by Jacinta Dalton with permission from Jacinta Dalton

Original Artwork by Dietmar Lederwasch with permission from Dietmar Lederwasch: ‘Late for the Exhibition with Figs’ is dedicated to those who tried to save the Laman Street figs. There is a lack of colour in the Art to reflect that now there are sadly only ghosts left.