Of course the logging business ain’t what it used to be and to make up for it and keep the family afloat Alistair, Violetta and Shaun dabble in the darker edges of politics. When they aren’t chopping wood or larking around naked in a fucking waterfall they are scheming to make money and power in the city. Wire-taps, bribery, blackmail and corruption are a lifeblood to them and ma and pa don’t know it any more than they suspect the ‘midnight ramblings’ etc of the teenagers.

One night (Nov 23rd) Viloletta and Shaun slip off into town to pick up some dirt and bribe money for laundering in a car-park. Something goes wrong (a big plot device with like a double/triple cross and counter cross betrayal thing that’d take too long to explain) and they end up killing some guy in the shoot-out. The bloke what gets it is a minor govt official who’s queer and in need of extra cash to pay for a holidays in Thailand.

Shaun, for his own efforts in the shoot out, gets a bullet in the leg and he and Violetta struggle to make it back to the wooden shack in a stolen car, deadman’s blood on their shoes and a suitcase full of forged Danish Kroner in the boot.

As the car bumps into their driveway a cock crows three times and from this bad omen things only get worse. A sheep is born inside out and the Pac-Men on Alistair’s Game-Boy go ape-shit suicidal, eating each other and hanging themselves on digital trees.

On the third night of bad omens etc the ghost of the queer bloke from the car park comes back to haunt them all, moaning and jangling his chains outside the windows of their shack so Dad Robinson in his sequinned suit can’t help but wake up and ask what the fucking hell is going on. The ghost bloke sees him and flees, leaving a message written in Anti Freeze on the windows:

WATCH OUT ASSHOLE it says and RIVER PHOENIX SPEAKS.

On its third visit the ghost of the queer bloke comes into the house. Pa wakes – gives him coffee and pie. The little ones stir, sleeping and dreaming of cot-death in their beds beneath the stairs. The ghost bloke finishes his coffee, delivers a dire warning (threatens yrs of plague dogs and Thatcherism), promises revenge revenge in a horrifying voice and leaves.

Pa can’t sleep, can’t get back to sleep. He tries counting sheep, stars, satellites, sirens, slaloms, skylarks, anything, but nothing gets him to sleep so in the end he hits the bottle. Picture this – Pa drinking bathtub gin from a free-with-petrol-tumbler, hands shaking, the future of his family, his acre of land, the field where gramps is buried etc etc all rolling thru his small mind.