Fiction
The God Problem Solver
Crime pays, very poorly
Eddy Carminkle perched himself on the stool at his favourite machine in the pokies lounge at Burwood RSL. Zorro had been his friend for many years, had stuck with him through thick and thin; the soundtrack to a miserable life seldom interrupted by the bright lights of hope.
But on this day, Eddy was not hitting the magic button of wealth creation. He placed his hands on the shoulders of the machine and whispered towards the screen.
‘I’ve found it Z; my retirement fund. Our escape plan.’
Eddy had dreamed of his retirement for as long as he could remember. He knew the exact house he wanted to purchase. A rundown three-bedroom cottage on the northern edge of the Victorian coastline, a place called Golden Beach, on a grassy bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
He would take Zorro too, place him in the room with the view, and they would sit together — Eddy, Zorro and the ocean — and while away the last twenty years of his life. The house had been on the market for six months, listed at $174,000. Eddy was one hundred and seventy-three thousand nine hundred and twenty-two dollars short.
A slap on his back snapped Eddy out of his dream and rattled the bony vertebrae of his spine.
‘You still talking to machine like lunatic?’
Andre Volkov’s deep voice cut through the burble of electronic chatter, the siren songs of the 21st century succubus.
Eddy swivelled on his stool and greeted his friend. ‘Andre! My main man. How’s the little fella?’
‘Darryn is good. Is becoming fat and strong, like father.’
Eddy nodded enthusiastically. Andre himself stood five foot six and had the build of a welterweight boxer. Andre liked to reinforce the nickname he had created for himself: The Giant, despite bearing no resemblance to the famous wrestler. He was still a giant compared to Eddy though.
‘Good good good,’ Eddy replied, words shooting out of him like one of the meth heads that hung around the carpark. ‘Yeah, so, anyway, I’ve figured it out mate. The scheme to end all schemes. This plan is fuckin tight,’ Eddy continued, squeezing his fists into balls.
‘You always have scheme. And you always sit here in room full of losers with half warm piss beer and hard on for computer. How this any different?’
‘Nah mate. This is it. This is the one. You heard of Airtasker?’
‘Yes. Renae find cheap plumber from there when toilet blocked with twenty-six of Darryn’s nappies.’
‘Yeah yeah, that’s right. I’ve created a profile; check this out,’ Eddy said, opening up his iPhone knockoff and passing it to Andre to read.
God. Member since October 2023.
God listens. No problem too big or too small. Your prayers will be answered.
‘This you?’
‘Yeah,’ Eddy said, grinning, his eyes wide as saucers.
‘How you make money from this?’
‘Sacrifice. It’s all in here.’
Eddy pulled a pocketbook bible out of his jacket and flicked to a section highlighted fluro yellow.
‘Jesus answered, If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me. I just have to make sure they know I’m poor. And that I’m tight with J.C.’
The crack of Zorro’s whip woke Eddy at 5.19 the next morning. He rolled over to find his phone and saw a new notification blinked from the Airtasker app. Go time.
Eddy hopped on his bike after a breakfast of cornflakes with chocolate milk and rode over to the address in Dulwich Hill. His purple 14 speed Breezer — found in a council cleanup — was technically a seven speed, as the lowest seven gears remained inaccessible. This made climbing even the slightest of hills a challenge, so by the time Eddy arrived his shirt dripped with sweat, and he wheezed like an asthmatic in a smoke machine.
He plonked himself on the brick wall fence and assembled a rollie. An old woman in a pink dressing gown opened the front door and staggered down the path towards him. Her feet cut across each other like a pair of scissors, and she almost fell into a lemon tree before joining him at the fence.
‘Hello,’ she said.
‘You Eileen?’ Eddy asked.
The woman stared at him for a few seconds before she replied. ‘Yes, I am.’
‘I’m God. Here about the roses.’
‘Ah, you are from the internet.’
‘Bingo. What seems to be the problem?’
‘Well, my roses here — they are Wollerton old hall roses, are you familiar with them?’
‘Very.’
‘Yes, well they aren’t quite growing as well as I would like.’ Eileen dropped her voice to a whisper, and Eddy had to lean in to catch her. ‘Certainly not as well as Shirley’s next door.’
Eddy followed her gaze across the neighbor’s fence and saw a bunch of pale mandarin coloured flowers bigger, brighter, and healthier than the ones next to his feet.
‘Right,’ he said, nodding. ‘You want me to kill em’.’
Eileen gasped. ‘Gosh, no. I just wish mine were a bit… More heavenly.’
‘You called the right man. Now, as per my Lord and saviour — the great J.C — good things come to those who sacrifice. I need you to bundle up your three most valuable possessions and place them under the lemon tree tonight. When you wake, these once piss-weak roses will be halfway up to the promised land.’
Eddy made a rough attempt at the sign of the cross and waved his half-finished cigarette around like a stick of incense.
Eileen looked confused, but nodded her head and stumbled back up the path. Eddy could see faded brown stains on the back of her gown. His mother used to have the same stains, when she wandered the corridors of the nursing home in the last years of her life. Eddy pushed those images aside and turned his bike around for home.
That night Eddy returned with a shovel strapped across his back and a Coles shopping basket tied to his handlebars. For the loot.
He couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw a small package underneath the lemon tree. He was tempted to grab the package and scarper, but it wouldn’t be enough to buy him the beachside cottage in Victoria. He needed to build his profile, garner a bunch of positive reviews to attract the bigger fish. Too soon to burn bridges now.
He got to work with his shovel and dug up Eileen’s pitiful rose bushes. He set them aside, moved next door to Shirley’s and repeated the process. Eddy had done the odd landscaping job back in the day, so the replanting process was familiar to him.
After he had swapped the rose bushes, he sat on the brick fence again and let the cool of the night dry the sweat running down his arms. He crafted a rollie and blew smoke up at the moon. His lungs, far older than the 53 years printed on his driving licence, protested, and sent a racking cough up through his throat and out into the night.
Eddy ducked down as a light flicked on in Shirley-the-former-champion-rose-grower’s house, and waited until it returned to darkness. He slinked back into Eileen’s yard and retrieved the package, threw it in his basket and made the long ride back home.
‘I should have been more specific,’ Eddy whispered to Zorro the next day.
The loot had not been as bountiful as Eddy had hoped. A pearl necklace (cheap), a framed photo of a uniformed man with a head dipped in Brylcreem (useless), and a handwritten recipe for an eggless sponge cake (might be worth a try).
Eddy nursed a warm beer and a pineapple investment in the Spanish vigilante for the next hour and a half. Four features and a couple of risky double-ups later, Eddy was up $365, and his good mood had returned.
When Andre walked into the pokies lounge carrying a lemon soda, Eddy leapt off his stool and mock punched his friend’s stomach.
‘Hey, hey, the Giant’s here! What’s happening big fella?’
Andre sighed as he shrugged out of his suit jacket and loosened his tie. ‘Work. No wonder I avoid it for so long. Fucking miserable existence of proletariat crushes your spirit.’
‘That’s right, mate. And it’s even harder when you’ve seen the other side.’ Eddy leaned towards his friend. ‘Let’s work together again, like the good old days.’
Andre shook his head. ‘Renae would kill me if I quit this job. How else we feed little Darryn?’
‘Andre, if my scheme keeps working the way it is, we could feed half the babies in Bulgaria. Let me shout you a feed.’
Read on for part 2: