After the Wedding and My Mouth Still Tastes Like Battery Acid

'Whore.' says Matt. Moorooduc Estate. It's the day after Clark and Hayley's wedding and he is shitty at Cat because she woke him up an hour before breakfast. ' You f-cking whore. You have no idea what kind of floodgates that you have opened. I am going to make a point of calling you at four o'clock every morning and tell you it's breakfast time. We'll see how you feel then. Whore.' Cat is quite comfortable ignoring Matt since she has had years of experience. She turns a page of the newspaper. My stomach acids have decided to eat the body that has abused it for so long, forever eating bad curries, pork rind, light bulbs and 747s and it is working it's way towards my mouth. There is a hungover silence on the balcony where we sit, broken only by a fearful waitress who sets down our coffees and scurries back into the kitchen. Matt stubs out a cigarette in the peacock's eating dish.

Ah yes. The cigarettes.

(Continuing from last post)
After we had waited for one of the three taxis in the Mornington Peninsula area for three quarters of an hour Cat decided, Screw it. I've only had five champagnes. I can drive down unmarked country roads in the dead of night.

If only we had turned left instead of right....

Cat had a craving for cigarettes. Matt also wanted cigarettes. The car turns right. Now, just to set the scene: We are in wine country where roads stretch ONE WAY through to the vanishing point. The convenience store (sic) is miles away and hidden. Petrol stations exist that do not actually sell any petrol, just tire checkers. Supermarkets close at a sensible time of about eight o'clock on a Saturday because, c'mon, who would want cigarettes at 11:30 at night?

About an hour into our cigarette hunt and tensions are running fairly high. There are no signposts to indicate where we are. There is just the absolute certainty that whichever direction we choose to go down, it will be the wrong one. 'Stop the car!' grumbles Matt. Cat complies. Matt flips through the Melways and speaks not for several minutes. 'Do you want me to have a look at the map Matt?' asks Cat.

Silence.

'Do you want me to have a look at the Melways?' asks Cat.
Matt flings open the door and leaves the car, Melways in hand. He cannot read the Melways because fury is causing his hands to shake too much and he has to tip over a few cows before he is calm enough to find out where the Hell we are. Cat and I chat for a while in the car, not too loudly in case it sets Matt off again and he breaks the headlights in rage.

So a ten minute drive stretched into an hour and three quarters of fruitless endeavour (we were still cigarette-less) before we arrived at Moorooduc Estate haggard and with murder in our eyes. After a few glasses of Moet (tasting less like champagne and more like the contests of my lunch) I retire to bed. The other two decide to try to find cigarettes once more. I learn in the morning that they managed to find someplace that sells them and that they only yelled at each other for half the journey.

Epilogue- Well, that was the Clark and Hayley wedding from my perspective. Two things though: Foistly, My snore has been described by some as reminiscent of a dying sea lion's death thrall combined with a weird Star Wars creatures' bleating. This horrid sound woke Cat up early in the morning so she decides to go for a quick drive. 'Hey, it turns out you weren't such a bad navigator after all,' she says to me,' we were really close the first time we drove to Moorooduc Estate but you couldn't see the entrance from where we were driving.' Knew it. And Secondly, back at Clark's Ranch we find out that one of the ladies from the night before fell through a window at her hotel. The wounds were not too deep but she did have to go home with bandaged hands.