The Kangaroo Suit
 
Bang!
 
The bullet hit above her pouch, shattering her hips and macerating her insides—tubes and ovaries, in an instant, turned into kangaroo tartare. Premium, no doubt: she is, after all, without a doubt, top-shelf material.
Something they’d sell at the South Melbourne Market.
Or Paris.
Or somewhere even better.
But no matter! Her womanhood, like something left in the back of the fridge, expired long ago.
Used: only once.
Once enough.
The kangaroo tries to stand and can’t. Paralysis. No choice but to drag herself to safety of her den, tail and legs trailing like three wet, brown towels. Lucky that there is little weight to pull. She has not been eating so well of late.
She drags herself inside. There is an impediment. Thin as she is, room to move is as sparse as kind words are. Pushing forward into the clunking, clattering mess, it’s like being born backwards, from fear into safety.
Safety from the gun.
From the words.
The kangaroo squeezes into her den, back into the decaying filth of her life, disturbing the swarms of fat and sluggish blowflies that, like everyone else, were not sad to see her go. But now, the flies, they zoom in to the scent of her defiled belly—the gunshot rent in her body and soul. They settle on the wound; they feast. Insects are just like people.
Encompassed now in the filth of her den, the kangaroo rests.
And the world is upended… (Like a Ludo board thrown in anger. Oh, how we always used to—)
Blood pumps from her with the memory of every menses. To let it flow from the wound is to surrender. Does she want this?
A bizarrely human intelligence kicks in.
Blood is made of iron, right?
And that’s in meat.
Must find the meat.
Precious. Rare.
Where the flies that do not seek her flesh, the ancillary swarm, there is other flesh. Once upon a time, it was chicken and cashews, a succulent Chinese takeaway, but that “once upon” is long, long past.
It is the kangaroo that paws with paws the fetid meat into her mouth.
The Once-Upon-A-Time-Chicken-And-Cashew comes from a yellowed plastic tub. It has more jelly coating than is proper and it smells more of garbage than is sane; it has things inside it that should not wriggle.
Blood sucking flies invade her snout as she chomps, and gags, but swallows them and all. There follows an unfamiliar warmth in an empty belly.
She has not been eating so well of late.
This is perhaps not so well, either—
Of course it’ll take some days good solid days to get things right she can do it if she puts her mind to it she knows she can first thing to do is go to the IGA get some of those big industrial garbage bags you know the type the big black ones you can’t rip get maybe three or four rolls tell people you’re donating to charity tell them it’s for old clothes they don’t need to know about the piles of bottles and wine casks and—
The kangaroo shudders.
The warmth in her belly curdles. There’s a flatulent rumbling thunder warning of what will be decidedly unpopular rain.
With a small whimper, the kangaroo sprays dishwater-brown liquid across the den’s floor.
A floor not washed in years.
Good thing she bought that fancy steam mop last year, or the one before (give, but not take, three more). Better get it out of the box. Now, where did it get to in all this?
Boxes. Bottles. Containers of mail-order-this and wine-in-a-carton that. Waste, like mountains, surround her. She is the epicentre, like Shangri-La in the Himalayas (remember that holiday Garry? That free book the hotel gave us?  But that was Fiji, wasn’t it? Long ago, before the shot was fired…)
But cleaning it all will be so easy; she bought the best mop. Only the best for her. She smiles as she imagines the shining tiles.
What does a caring kanga do?
Cleans those floors for me and you.
 
Waking now.
The kangaroo’s tongue is a ball of rubber bands buried in a sandpit of salt. Thirst overwhelms. A paw reaches for the glass of water her husband leaves on the bedside table. It isn’t there. She isn’t in bed either, but on the living room floor.
“Garry,” she barks, her voice like gravel sliding along cold glass. Then she remembers: it was HE that did this to her. After all those years she gave HIM, after the marriage HE threw away—
Janine, he’d called. Janine!
His voice distant; she’d been inside at the time. Garry had been cleaning the black, half-decomposed leaves from gutters around the veranda. Bucket after bog-stinking bucket.
Janine, he’d called.
And she had yelled back and told him to: “Bloody well wait!”
She’d thought he’d only wanted another fresh bucket.
About twenty minutes after the first call, and two cigarettes later, she walked around the house and found her husband crumpled on the ground, bent oddly, lying beside a timber post supporting the veranda from which he’d fallen.
It only takes one wrong step to fall. His vertebra and pelvis all broken up. A year off work. Back brace. Learning to walk again. First a frame, then two walking sticks like alien robot pincers.
She nursed him from sickness unto health.
That was the fucking promise.
Janine! he’d called. Day after day after day…
And then, one day, he no longer needed to call. He could walk.
Walk away.
But, oh no, that would be too easy. That was not for HIM. He waited. Out in the forest. The bush on her county property. Like that Predator thing in that movie that scared her poor boy Heath right out of her pouch all those years ago (horrible Schwarzenegger movie; she had to sleep by his bed that night).
Like that monster, Garry stalked her.
And he took out his gun and he shot her.
It's all that woman’s fault. That bitch! She’d always been there, hanging around from the start. That ugly bitch!
The kangaroo tries to scream: but her tongue is as dry and battered as a pub’s welcome mat in drought. The thirst instinct makes her—not necessarily hop into action—but spasm with paralysed legs across the living room floor into the kitchen, to the fridge.
She pulls the door open, releases a sour fog. The door holds no bottles, except for a tomato sauce solid with green mould. The shelves house only the plastic-wrapped corpses of bloated, unknowable flesh. A Dali-esque cheese drips from the top shelf.
The crisper?
Maybe some fruit, oh, for an orange. A sweet, juicy, orange. Licking her lips, she pulls the crisper out.
But what’s inside… yeah, it ain’t real crisp.
Her hands rummage through swampy black tangles that may have once been cabbage. Thirst maddens. She puts her snout in, sniffing. There’s moisture in the air. That means there’s water in the bottom. Closing her eyes, the kangaroo paws the crisper drawer to her mouth, tilts, and gulps down brackish crisper floor juice.
Ahhh. She savours it like a fine wine: tart, an essence of rot, with just a hint of amoebas.
But it’s not enough! The thirst, now disturbed like a soccered bull-ant’s nest, attacks a thousand-fold. She must drink. So much fluid lost from her wounds.
The kitchen sink? No way she can lift herself up there with paralysed legs. The tap outside is low enough, but Garry’s out there with his gun. The toilet…?
Don’t be disgusting!
She has class.
The classy, caring kanga pulls herself back into her den, into the filth of her life, scattering wine-bottles, knocking over mail-order-shopping boxes, scouring the detritus for precious, liquid remnants. Every last bottle she tests is drained; every can contains nothing but air.
And then, the clouds part, and a beam of sun hits it. A crumbled cardboard box adorned with a Matisse-like image of a young lady in a boat—rip it open, sunder the pastoral! Inside, a silver bag, bloated with warm gas. Her incisors bite. Sudden exhalation of fetid vinegar. Sucking now, hot secondary fermentation of old wine, but liquid still. The silver bag inflates and deflates with her breath like a vestigial lung.
Lying here in garbage, paralysed from the waist down, sucking wine from an old goon bag, Janine the kangaroo wonders that maybe something is a bit, well, off with her.
Maybe, just maybe, she should rally her efforts into getting help of some description.
Janine finds the mobile phone in her pouch. But the stupid thing won’t turn on, who designed these blasted things? Impossible to use. There, got it. What number, who to call? Garry… As if! Heath… Don’t want to bother him… Derrin… No, he’s dead, isn’t he? And there’s always triple 0.
Of course, she can’t really call anyone. What if they saw her like this? What if they saw the house in the state it’s in?
No, that would never do!
Janine throws the phone and, even before it completes the parabolic rainbow, she’s seeing what it will be like when she:
Gets Herself Sorted.
She’s going to start having dinner parties again she’ll invite all her old friends maybe unbox that Thermomix she’s been meaning to use start with shrimp-cocktails and champagne then beef bourguignon and red wine for mains and they’ll laugh about the old times no need for Garry or Heath and her friends can all stay over and they’ll put on records real records the proper ones with proper music that she kept somewhere and then they’ll dance and drink just her and her all her friends late into the night and that night will maybe never end—
It's so wonderful.
To be young.
To have a future.
There are dewdrop tears in her eyes as she blacks out, happy.
 
The distant sound of a rattling, two-stroke engine wakes the kangaroo.
Afternoon light streams past the broken living room curtains into a tower of wine bottles: an art installation of prismatic spectra through which hundreds of blowflies buzz, wings blinking momentary reds and blues and yellows. She stares up at the nicotine-stained ceiling, watching the projected lights that remind her of Christmas, and Heath, yellow pyjamas with little brown anchors, wrapping the lights around the tree, ever so critical afterwards about the placement of each bauble.
The gunshot happened at Christmas lunch decades ago.
She’d had maybe a bit too much cooking sherry that morning and forgot to take the turkey out of the plastic before putting it in the oven. And maybe she didn’t really notice until she put it on the dinner table.
The turkey sat like a black cancer for all to see.
And then, in the silence, her husband said the words:
“One of these days I’m going to stick you in a roo suit, take you out the back and shoot you.”
Garry said that. They’d been talking about the big kangaroo cull. Of course, it was just a joke. Everyone laughed. Even Heath.
Her little boy was only thirteen.
They all laughed.
Even she did.
Laughed it off.
Now the kangaroo’s Christmas tree is in the ceiling cavity, covered in dust and cobwebs, having not been taken down these last 15 years. There has been no man to climb the ladder into the aptly named “manhole” and carry down her decorations. She’s 72, after all. Do they expect her to do everything? She isn’t the woman she used to be.
A woman.
Janine looks at her legs. Her person legs.
They resemble broom handles draped in uncooked chicken skin. She is naked from the waist down. Her feet are swollen red, each toe a bursting tomato, her thighs are mottled with bruises and dried, cracked skin. Her stringy grey pubis trembles with fleas.
What was imagined as blood from a gunshot is just streams of caked-up shit. Wholly human shit.
The human tries to stand. The paralysis is no dream. For a moment she thinks that her legs have just gone to sleep. She slaps them, trying to pump back life. Numb but no tingle. She jams a thumb in, nail corrugated and grey, and feels perhaps a distant feather, a princess and the pea sensation. There is a puckering of blood too lethargic to even drip.
Alcoholism. Malnutrition. Starvation.
“Stick you in a roo suit, take you out the back and shoot you.”
The gun—the word—was fired decades ago.
Janine’s body collapses like a dead thing. Her heartbeat pounds against her skull with irregular beats, each one too weak to reach her dead legs, each one maybe the last one.
Panic rises: where is her phone? She had it out, right, before, when she was the kangaroo.
She threw it?
Janine looks across the filth of her life, her living room and kitchen, hoarded possessions, garbage as high as the dining table, bottles, cans, containers and cartons, and she knows there’s not a chance of finding that phone, her one slim chance of survival.
And, perhaps, this is for the best.
Janine remembers her first proper suicide attempt. She took an overdose of pills years ago thinking, in some ways, that nothing would actually change. She used to know how to program the VCR back then, actually put in a fresh tape and set it to record the movie of the night, something with Judie Dench in it. It’d be ready for the next day she never intended to make.
She locked herself in their bathroom with the sleeping pills and a vintage bottle of Moet Garry left behind. She drank it out of a coffee cup. Derrin was staying with her at the time, trying to Get Herself Sorted. But her brother had gone out, wasn’t supposed to be back for hours.
The overdose was just like falling asleep. The beating heart that slowed, ever so subtly, her body sinking and slumping as she laid down now on the cool tiles, eyes closed, and, like a child, sucking her thumb.
She melted into floor: spreading out… going out.
Then waking with a vacuum cleaner shoved down her throat. Bright fluorescent lights and a stomach pump.
There’ll be no second chance this time.
But it’s not happening like it did with the pills. Her head is on fire; her blood is syrupy; it hurts. It really hurts. Pain is pain, but the fear is the worst, the fear is like maggots crawling inside her, wriggling and wriggling in her stomach, her lungs, her throat, filth choking her from the inside out—
Help. Help me. Please God, I don’t want this!
The two-stroke engine is coming closer, recognition now, something she used to do. Did it better in fact. This man cuts her lawn too low. Turning towards the window she sees the outline of the gardener pushing the lawnmower.
Help is at hand.
She can’t call out, he’d never hear. But her arms still work, and she is so light. She has, after all, not been eating so well of late. She starts to crawl. It will be hard, but she can pull herself to the door, she has the strengths, it’s a simple matter, just slide it open, and wave a bony hand.
She’ll be found.
Saved.
But then what?
They’ll find out about the house.
No.
Janine turns away and buries herself back under the filth of her life just so, so, so ashamed.
In that strange dark, Janine remembers how mother used to tuck her in at night. She’d wrap the blankets so tight it hurt, almost like mother was afraid she’d escape in the night. This one time, little Janine turned around and dived under the covers, headfirst, exploring a blackness of sheets so taut about her that, reaching the depths, she became stuck.
And yet, terrified as she was of the sudden entrapment, there was an urge to just give up and… stay.
Janine listens to the mower for a full half an hour before the noise grows more distant. And then stops.
 
Put on the suit.
Become the kangaroo. 

Audiologist Wow! is a true story written by a fake author.

The book bears the name Kevin Sanders Kettletown, but you will quickly notice from the author’s profile description and photo that Kevin is a… puppet. A very well-dressed, cheerfully orange, impeccably manufactured puppet—but unmistakably inanimate.

How did this bizarre pseudonym come about?

Was the marketing department drunk? Does the Editor-In-Chief of Bad Pug Publishing have a paraphilia for Sesame Street? How ugly or uncharismatic is the “real author” that he needed to be replaced with a bulbous-nosed, basketball-headed dummy with a hand up inside him?

The back cover of Audiologist Wow! states simply that Kevin “hides his identity for fear of the consequences.”

And while I am not at liberty to breach the author’s confidence, I can offer some insight into the process of arriving at this admittedly unusual publishing circumstance.

Part One: The Author Declines

He told me the devastating news over dinner, accompanied by suburban curry and Yarra Valley shiraz. I’d been laying out the marketing plan: a conference launch, blogs, and possibly an Instagram account, when the author interrupted me.

“I’m not doing that. I’ve decided: I’m publishing anonymously.”

“What? No, that’s… commercial suicide. Why?”

“Look, Keith. I don’t want my patients to know I wrote it.”

I swallowed both vindaloo and the little negative voice in my head saying, No patient will know—because no one reads a book about audiologists by an audiologist if you won’t promote it. Instead, I said:

“So what? It’s an amazing story. You humanise audiology—not just our profession, but all the jobs connected to healthcare. It’s so honest it’s unpublishable by mainstream standards, but it’s pure, unadulterated reality. It’ll be a landmark of healthcare confessionals!”

(Yes, I may have been overselling, but I’d already sunk an indecent number of hours into editing, proofing, and formatting the Audiologist Wow! manuscript.)

“Yes, I wrote it—it’s my confession,” he replied. “But at the end of the day, I’m an audiologist. Audiology is what pays my mortgage. I’m not risking that.”

“What risk? This book will make you famous… An audiology influencer!”

“I don’t want that. I just like to write. Isn’t that enough?"

“You can’t just write!” I said. “It’s unrealistic. You’ve got to be a persona—someone the audience can connect with. Especially since it’s a true story—”

“There’s the rub! You know, there’s the thing with the tissues. What would a patient say about that?”

It was, admittedly, an awkward rub.

“Mate,” I said, washing down garlic naan with shiraz. “You’ve got nothing to worry about. You know, the “romantasy” genre is like one of the biggest sellers out there? Your sadly human antics are vanilla compared to blow-by-blow descriptions of acrobatic intercourse between dwarves, dragons, and demons! That stuff is literal pornography. With fairies!”

“But it sells,” Kevin said, laughing. “I wrote in the wrong genre, didn’t I?”

“No! You’ve made something those other so-called books don’t have—can never have. You’ve made literature. Something truly human.”

“My patients don’t want to see me as human,” he said. “Not a flawed human. Maybe even a terrible one.”

“We’re all human, Kevin,” I said. “All flawed. That’s the point.”

“It’s not a luxury I have,” he said. “What if they see the real me? And what if what they see erodes an already tenuous trust in our… perceptually challenged profession? How could I ever sell a hearing aid again?”

Here lies a problem with releasing a “true” novel. Hearing aids carry profit margins in the thousands of dollars; audiology work is reliable and well-paid. First-time books? If you sell more than fifty copies, you’ve beaten the average.

Kevin, the audiologist, had a lot to lose and very little to gain by becoming Kevin, the writer.

“But I need you,” I said at last.

“I know. But I need to protect myself. I’m too old now for the risks of youth,” he said, topping up our glasses with shiraz, a gesture so familiar: it was the first thing he ever did for me. He grinned, “But Keith. You’re the so-called Editor-In-Chief, and publishing was mostly your idea anyway. Fixing problems like this is what I pay you for, right?”

And thus, my ego came back to bite my now authorless ass. I had pushed Kevin into publishing. I had created a business just to do so, sunk my money in as readily as his. I had co-opted his creativity to live vicariously in the literary world.

Who was going to buy a book by a faceless author?

I downed the shiraz, dug into the curry, and began to think…
 
Part Two: Blame It On The Shakespeare

And so, I was left with no face.

No face for the author profile. No face to spruik the book on social media. No face at the Audiology Australia conference launch—and no hands, feet, or body to lug boxes, furniture, and marketing paraphernalia up to the exhibition floor and sell the actual bloody books.

In a crisis—and as a shameless literary nerd—I remembered Shakespeare. In Hamlet, he writes: “God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.”

I’m not sure the Bard intended me to take him quite so literally, but that’s exactly what I did.

Over the next few weeks, the mad idea materialised. I thought of Sesame Street and asked: What would Ernie look like if he aged into a writer? I commissioned a professional puppet maker. I coined the “Kevin Sanders Kettletown” pseudonym over a bucket of KFC with my family. Then I worked out how to sign books with a marker strapped to a stick, later clipped into the puppet’s hand.

I was feeling pretty chuffed with myself when I revealed to the “real” Kevin how I was going to replace him. Kevin picked up the page of my practice, puppet signatures. His face went pale. I admit, my first attempts were more than a little… scribbly.

“You’ll never sell books with that graffiti on them!”

“But it’s fun,” I said with a shrug. I was feeling rather smug; by choosing anonymity, he’d really given up the right to veto.

“It’s ridiculous!”

“So is much of your book.”

“The book’s a comedy, sure, but the message is serious. The farce serves to illuminate the human condition. This is turning the whole thing into some sort of silly prank.”

“No. That’s where you’re wrong. Kevin isn’t a joke. Kevin is a… symbol.”

“A symbol of an unsound mind,” Kevin whispered under his breath.

“We’re self-publishing a book about audiology,” I replied. “That’s not something anyone with a truly sound mind would do.”

Kevin nodded. He looked at the puppet sitting on the table. “He’s a cute little bastard. But I need you to do one thing?”

“What’s that?”

“Mention that I’m still really good-looking in person.”

And so, I did (and do again).

And so, we published.
 
Part Three: Dogs Chasing Perfect Tails

When Shakespeare wrote, “God has given you one face, and you make yourself another,” he was referring to the interpersonal masks we all wear, one after another. The small but different personas we present: the dutiful son or daughter, the fun-loving mate, the attentive lover, the scholarly student, the dutiful audiologist, and the perfect employee.

We, in audiology, as in all healthcare, present the Face of Best Practice. We must be human with patients, yes—but only the very best of humans. We must be interested in our patient, not ourselves; we must be correct even under conditions of uncertainty; we must be impartial, despite all our innate biases. It’s a clinical ideal we pursue minute by minute and never quite reach, because no one can be the best of anything. And yet professional hubris says we must.

We’re an industry of dogs chasing our perfect tails, barking at each other: “You should do better and catch it already!”

What better way to symbolise the farce, the falsity of catching the ideal, than with a puppet like Kevin Sanders Kettletown?

Kevin is bright orange, obviously ridiculous. His wobbly “KSK!” signature-from-a-stick remains atrocious. As a puppet, he attracts attention, lowers expectations and leaves behind nods of acceptance, bemused smiles, and silent acknowledgment that life is, in many ways, rather silly. He is the Face of Human Fallibility.

To laugh at him is catharsis—through that laughter, we remember that no healthcare professional is perfect and never can be.

In the end, we all wear a face. Inside, like Kevin, we’re full of some kind of stuffing—histories of mistakes, good intentions gone wrong—and we’re trying, very hard, to be greater than the dull matter that we’re composed of.

The “real” Kevin confessed to me, only recently: “You really should tell people the puppet was part of the publishing strategy from the beginning. He’s been a far better advocate—or, what did you call it? Symbol—than I ever could have been.”

“I could. And probably should. It'd be nice to imagine people thought I was that clever. But, I think, that is not the point of a… Kevin.”
 
Regardless, cunning plan or happy accident, Kevin the puppet is more than a funny author’s non-de plume:

He’s how truth reveals its face.