Anne Brisden

He'd gotten the sack from his job, of course, having gone near blind on the homemade spirit he'd cooked up in his backyard.

But on his way out, he'd lifted a fat pad of pledge authorities.

He'd been selling them for 20 bucks a piece ever since.

The biggest business in town was grog.

Always had been.

Closely following that was the church, and after that, since the last crackdown, came drug and alcohol counselling.

None of the charities in town would give a man as much as a cup of tea without a signed authority now.

The dole office was likely to cut off your cheque if you were a registered pisshead and not in the program.

The counsellors ran the show, so they benefited most.

Cash, grog or girls, sometimes the unholy trinity, if they were particularly hungry.

Three days after that phone call, anyway, I was ready to head over to the in-law's farm with a signed authority in my pocket.

I'd forged the signature myself.

I'd picked up a suit jacket at the Salvation Army, and I'd had a shave and spit-polished my only pair of leather shoes.

I'd even thought about a haircut, but decided against it, calculating that the $12 would be better spent on a six-pack of Rebel Yell.

I settled for some ancient hair oil from the back of the medicine cupboard before heading out.

The hair oil had belonged to my grandfather, Abraham.

A mission black who'd found God as a young man and who'd known the Bible, Old Testament and new, word for word.

He'd bought our two-room weatherboard with the money he'd earned over 20 years as a back-breaking ditch worker for the waterboard.

He'd always planned to set up his own church in the back room of the house.

But as he got older and hunched over, the idea got away from him.