The Story of Danny Dunn Read Free

double entendre in a flash.
    â€˜That’s it precisely! Shit!’
    â€˜What’s that suppose’ta mean?’
    â€˜You eat corn. Next mornin’ you go for a shit. What do you see?’
    â€˜Eh?’
    â€˜Nothin’s happened to the corn, mate. Them kernels are still in their little polished yellow jackets, same as when you swallowed them, digestion juices can’t penetrate, see. No fermentation.’
    The corn man took a sip from his seven and shook his head. ‘Crikey! Ya learn somethin’ every day, don’t ya?’
    â€˜Stick around, son,’ Half Dunn said, pleased with his erudition.
    While Half Dunn could be described as a useless bastard, with no authority to do anything whatsoever except talk crap, like many seemingly unthinking people he possessed the capacity to talk to anyone on any subject, mining clues from their inanities and developing these to advance the conversation. Pubs by their very nature attract misfits and lonely men, and Half Dunn could talk to them all, adding to the pub’s air of congeniality and increasing its appeal.
    While Half Dunn drank more than his fair share of the profits and dispensed bonhomie and mindless opinions on everything from the perfidy of politicians to the training of ferrets, his wife, Brenda, put in a fifteen-hour day ending at 8 p.m. when she’d finally balanced the day’s receipts, checked the cellars, cleaned the beer pipes and personally polished the bar surfaces. Tommy O’Hearn was right to treat her with respect. Nothing escaped her. Before the cleaners arrived, she always removed the Scott industrial toilet rolls, then replenished them after the cleaners had left, to prevent their being replaced by near empty ones brought from home in a cleaner’s shopping bag. The Great Depression had left a residue of bad habits among basically honest people, and Brenda was onto every cleaning shortcut and sly trick in the trade.
    Even the bartenders knew better than to pocket the cash from the odd middy. Brenda had been known to stand on a bar stool and punch the daylights out of a six-foot barman she’d caught short-changing a drunk patron. She ran a tight ship and a spotlessly clean pub. While she left the bragging to Half Dunn, she would occasionally claim, with justifiable pride, that her last beer at night tasted as fresh as her third one (the first two were always discarded), and no one ever disputed this.
    But generally Brenda came as close as a woman may to being taciturn. She was different in almost every way to Half Dunn. Just five foot and half an inch, at seven stone she was as petite as Mick was grossly fat. Even though Michael Dunn’s name appeared above the main entrance to the pub as the licensee, she was most definitely the boss. While she was as conscientious as any wife in the ‘Yes, dear’ department and never put her husband down in public, it was apparent to the regulars that his opinions counted for bugger-all. She opened the pub doors precisely at ten each morning and she’d show the last drunk the pavement at precisely five minutes past six each evening; in between opening and closing, the decisions she made ensured that the Hero was one of the most successful and best-run pubs on the peninsula.
    Brenda Dunn fuelled all this effort with half-consumed cups of sweet black tea and Arnott’s Sao biscuits, ten of which she’d place in her apron pocket of a morning. When the pub closed she would repair to the backyard where three magpies waited expectantly for the brittle Sao crumbs. She also smoked three packets of Turf Filters a day. More precisely, she’d light sixty fags, take an initial puff to get each one going, then carefully rest the cigarette on one of the heavy glass ashtrays advertising a brewer or whisky distiller, which she placed, she always imagined, at points she frequently passed. More often than not, as she reached for the cigarette to take a second