As I arrived at Mac's Post Office/News Agency at 7am on the day before the Melbourne Cup, I realised this was an anniversary. Mac was busy arraying the sun hats, buckets, spades and other paraphernalia outside the entrance. To cross the threshold customers had to run a gauntlet of summer fripperies, which included, I noticed, mysterious items called 'Spiky Balls', plastic spheres studded with knobs, like World War II floating mines.
'It's two years to the day since I wrote that piece about you in Eureka Street,' I said.
'Can't be two years,' Mac said, then, conceding reluctantly, 'two years! My fan base hasn't grown. I blame the writer.'
'Well, my fan base is pretty static too. I guess I need a more interesting local subject.'
'What's going on?' he said. This is Mac's way of asking if anything of note is happening, or indeed, if anything at all is happening. But before I could answer, he launched into his own story.
In the unlikely event of his ever having to save himself, like Scheherazade, by telling a story every night for a thousand and one nights, Mac would be just warming up when his listeners called it quits and pleaded exhaustion around night number 700.
'There's a bloke comes in here pretty regularly, you'd have seen him, ex-army type, confident character. Always pleasant, unlike some.' His dismissive, sweeping gesture took in the entire township and most of the coast. 'Anyway, this bloke told me just the other day that he was working on his computer — I think he writes a bit, like you, only he's much more serious ...'
I winced, then grinned bravely.
'Actually,' Mac went on, warming to his narrative, 'he was revising and printing a speech he had given at his son's wedding, to give the happy couple a copy, when everything on his screen shuts down and disappears and replacing it is an urgent virus alert. A loud female voiceover warns him repeatedly that serious damage to his computer could occur.
'Now, as he said to me, this is the sort of thing you ignore or delete ...'
An elegantly dressed, elderly woman, who had come into the shop a few minutes earlier and selected a newspaper and a magazine and had been waiting for Mac to finish talking rather than interrupt, now seemed to realise he might not ever finish, so she moved towards the counter clutching a $10 note.
Mac gave her one of