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AUTHOR PROFILE Mark
Barwell was born in Port Kembla, NSW, in 1981. He grew up in the salty seaside
town of Kiama, and attended school in Wollongong. He relocated to Wollongong
shortly after commencing a degree in Civil Engineering at the local University,
where he made a point of having absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with the
Creative Writing department. Aside from writing, Mark’s interests include
cricket, drinking, muckraking, and impersonating an employee of the local City
Council. Any rumours pertaining to Mark’s supposed major shareholding in a
harem in Addis Ababa are spurious at best, though if pressed he can organise
bookings for the discriminating gentleman. PREFACE Upon
a certain summer’s day on Castlereagh Street, a semi-major thoroughfare
through the Central Business District of Sydney, Australia, an unusual event was
unfolding. It was a stiflingly hot and sticky summer’s day – itself not an
unusual event, not by any means. The buildings either side of the street stood
tall and proud, with storey upon storey of glass, sandstone, granite and marble
facades gleaming in the daylight – again, a long-established feature of the
streetscape and not, in itself, in any way unusual. What was unusual about the
scene was the teeming mass of people assembled upon the street, a seething
throng of several thousand protestors united in a cheeky spirit of defiance and
dissent; this in itself was a fairly unusual scene upon Castlereagh Street, but
adding significantly to matters was the fact that each and every one of them was
completely, totally and utterly naked. There was not a stitch of clothing to be
found among them, they all knew it well, and what’s more: they were proud. Arrayed
a hundred metres further down the street before the throng of naked revellers
was a large contingent of the local constabulary, a thousand-strong assembly of
the boys – and girls – in blue. They stood, in defiance of the sweltering
heat and the apparent trend towards reckless public nudity, in full uniform;
indeed, those policemen facing off against the nudists in the front line were
fully clad in riot gear, hefting sturdy plastic shields, helmets with visors,
and nasty-looking batons. Contrasting the cheeky, rebellious, buoyant mood of
the larger group of naked revellers, the police had a stern, grimly determined
– if somewhat uncomfortable – air about them as they blocked the
protestors’ path. The
footpaths on either side of the street were jam-packed with onlookers, members
of the general public who had found themselves witness to this unusual and
spectacular event. Moving amongst the crowds, several news crews were jockeying
for position as each tried to get the best angle, armed with bulky news cameras,
sound booms, and pointy elbows to clear their way; there were crews from all of
the major national networks, and a few more from some prestigious international
news networks as well. It was obvious that this was an event of considerable
significance, unusual though it was, and though no-one was sure what was going
to happen next, it could be said with certainty that it would be recorded for
posterity from at least a dozen angles and broadcast to untold millions. And
trapped in the middle of it all – between the nudists, between the police,
between the onlookers and between the news crews – there stood a man, one
solitary man, with nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and nowhere to put his
hands. He wore a pair of running shoes. He wore a balaclava. He wore a crude
plastic Viking hat. And he wore nothing else. This
man was known to thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, if not millions of
people, around Australia and around the world, as the Naked Viking: scourge of
the fashion industry, bane of the law enforcement community, and the leader and
champion of the Global Nudity Movement; and it was six thousand members of the
same Global Nudity Movement that were grouped behind him, having answered the
call to join him in his latest and most audacious demonstration. To a
considerably smaller group of people, however, this man was known as Condie: a
fairly typical, listless, unemployed layabout with perhaps a little too much
time on his hands, and a seeming propensity for getting himself stuck smack in
the middle of increasingly awkward, unusual, and potentially explosive
situations. And
as he stood frozen, in a sort of half-defensive, half-panicked crouch of
readiness, he assessed the situation: six thousand devoted, naked followers
behind him; one thousand scary-looking, battle-ready policepersons in front of
him; untold thousands of onlookers on the footpaths, in the buildings, and
behind the cameras either side; and each and every last one of them could see
his nads. “Fuck’s
sake,” Condie said to himself. “How do I get myself into shit like this?”
And quickly, to avoid having to decide what he was going to do next, he let his
mind flit backwards two months or so, to a different scene, on a different
street, in a different city, and he remembered how all of this got started;
which of his muck-raking, shit-stirring friends could – and would – be
blamed for it; and the terribly violent retribution he had in store for all of
them.
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