Brenda and Eddy: Young Love Shattered
By ADAM CONNORS and ALISON HUMPHRY
NB 2003: Notes follow in italics. Explanation at bottom.
Chris, the following is the photolisting and basic storyline, ‘go hard’ entwining ya narrative with elements of current events: Romeo and Juliet, the Paxtons, young wedding, Crash, liquor licensing laws, Elle’s WA ads shot by Sydney film company, uni mergers …
(pic1: The fishtank with headline … as in Romeo and Juliet, if you have the Romeo and Juliet promo shot, photoshop our faces onto theirs and distort them crazily)
(pic2: television/newsreader – newsreader yet to be shot, television photo there – with subhead)
Two council flats
both alike in dignity,
in far Carine where our cameras probe.
A pair of star cross’d lovers
make their lunch,
whose misadventure’d piteous overthrows,
do with their merger buy into their institutes’ strife …
(pic3: chicken boning line)
T’was like a dream come true for our two protagonists – Brenda and Eddy – who, both fresh out of school and awaiting their university year with a little monetary help from the dole, are randomly selected by a national current affairs show to take up a job on bewdiful Hamilton Island. While going about their business on the chicken boning line their eyes meet, across the giblet-laden floor, and POW! True love! The current affairs show host skulks out of their chickadee lovenest, his Logie award-winning story of woe mangled by their blossoming loveFURY!
(pic4: lonely calls … tear both phone shots down the middle and combine)
But life is a right bitchtrollwhore viewers, for just as their kanoodling reaches inestimable zeniths, the uni year takes hold and they return, from the sweet smell of chook gizzards at Hamilton Isle, alone and apart to their various family abodes in calm Carine. And alas, you see, Brenda is a nerdy protege who has entered her Morphology course at Murdoch University at the ripe ‘ol age of 15, while Eddy is a 20 year old clumsy dunce who has failed his driving test six times and studies Focus Pulling at Edith Cowan’s Joondalup campus. It all seems miles away for our young crumpets …
(pic5: crash bum shot)
With public transport reaching wacky new levels of inconsistancy – privatisation sees buses zooming about in no particular time, order or direction – their latent loins shrivel, their ears blister with phone hankering and blame is shot indiscriminately between quarters. In a fit of fitlessness, Eddy steals his dad’s car for a sexy love sojourn with his hugmuffin Brenda, only to wind the marvellous winged messenger machine around the first power pole in the precinct. No matter though, with Motorhead on the wireless and twisted metal all around, their crash becomes a consummation of cacophonous cleavage heaving and bottom bunting. Oh, their one sole meeting in a mince of urban-planned isolation.
(pic6: the rock concert)
But even as state planning and transport foils their fornication forays, far be it from university clubs and societies to pay heed to droll Drinksafe decrees, no! Apart, that is, from the moutainous perimeter fencing putting paid to our lovers’ lustful lechery, liquor licensing laws looming large. “I wannaBundynCoke” says Brenda, dental flossed by wire. “It’s jus fucked … anyways, it’s still rock’n roll to me” gargles Eddy, glued grimacing against the barrier by boofhead bogans. Sharing tongued spittle – faraway yet so close – the plastic cup is passed as yet another moment goes wanting. The last for a long age …
(pic7: um, nothin’ yet, make it up with photoshop … maybe steal an image from the uni prospectus – tear it out of the book with miscellaneous words around the image – and photoshop on faces)
Tis three years yonder as the scales fall from Brenda’s eyes, now of voting age, as she realises that the jollyhockeysticks ecumenical full colour university prospectus has not taken account of the latterday establishment of the school of Engineering: to wit, the toga party, where urination in all directions is condoned, nay, cultivated. Alack, the years have passed by our coddling couple, but as they sit bumper to rumpa in the cross-campus boat races a familiar proposition arises on Eddy. “E … Ed … dy, wear fort hard thou?” blubbers a besmitten Brenda, spying again her first fistful. Eveready Eddy realises too late that the demands of the dreaded draught will preclude any horizontal Morris dancing, dear, so near and yet … he awakes as a speed hump outside student village.
(pic8: combi photo)
Two young tykes, mere slips of things, bounding headlong into territories already well endowed by their elders, their loves congruent, big paws gambolling, their eyes bigger than their stomachs … finally, a heavenly merger! A mingling of life fluids, dilation and dilution – Murdoch and ECU! Brenda and Eddy finally unite again in the new improved superschool, a cross-campus combination of Miscellaneous Studies 401 (Honours Seminar in Psychology, Humanities, Sociology, Metallurgy, Morphology and Focus Pulling). Ah, happier times, as Brenda and Eddy embark, in the university’s plush cruiser, on a school excursion to a paperclip-making facility to critically assess societal degeneration in duplicate document fastening.
(pics9+10: Brenda looking wistful at the Ponds Institute, Eddy back on the chicken boning line)
With their years of verbose juggle and struggle over, their undergraduate degree blue-tacked to their parent’s walls, the promise of postgraduate study looms large for these straight A students. But as the institutional invoices roll in for their upfront fee financed further education, it becomes cryingly clear that they can’t afford to climb the greatest heights afforded to their ancestry.
Brenda and Eddy start to fight as the money gets tight, then Eddy’s big break – focus pulling on the Elle WA advertisements – goes to an interstate corporation, forever fluffing his future. Bitter, twisted and full of gin, our Eddy stumbles back to his one great triumph: the boning line on Hamilton Island. Brenda’s big break is a bit better – her Morphology mastery heralds job offers from as far as the Ponds Institute and HJs Carine, to which she flees to the former to shave rabbits and skin test frogs with cancerous chemicals. Their love shattered, their e-mails full of longing and X-files quotes, Brenda and Eddy’s story is subsequently stunted, a sick societal severance afforded from full fee foibles and political pitfalls. Wail woe and tremour, who is investing in your best interests?
th’end.
—
NB 2003: Egad! Give Adm and Al their heads and anything comes out. I’m not sure if Al used her real name on this either. I recall we slaved over this on Al’s Apple Plus. Though I don’t have the pics, they were hilarious: Al and I pulling a chicken wishbone on ‘the line’; my bare butt on a car bonnet with Al all over me; Al in a Pond’s Institute uniform standing outside Princess Margaret Hospital. Classy. Pic: From another Metior moment, the only PG-rated pic. A pineapple obscures a nameless-partner-in-crime.
Originally in Metior, the campus newspaper of Murdoch University. Edited at various stages herein by Bec Chau and Chris McLean.
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