The Mission

The sweltering air conditioning pressed in on us. We were the lads and we were on the mission. There was Nix, DeeBee and me. Agent Nix as the Mormon, Agent DeeBee the scruffy Street Tom and me as the Dandy. We swaggered in, the convention centre already itching with people eager for cheese. We made our way to the first table, reverse-alphabetical-order-wise. We blended in like a bunch of Queensland’s finest, post-Larry, $20-a-kilo bananas in a box of last week’s grapes.

‘Start us off,’ said Nix to the lady behind the stall. She eyed us off for a second before smiling and offering us cheese on a small wafer of poppy seed crispbread. Here one called Le Jack stood out. It seemed significant to me: the name. Le Jack.

‘Mmm, goats cheese,’ Nix mused, ‘Is there anything I wouldn’t do for goats cheese?’

‘Would you do this?’ I asked him.

‘Ah, no. I wouldn’t do that for goats cheese. For Roquefort maybe. If my life depended on it.’

‘Ok, well, glad we got that settle then.’

DeeBee had edged off to get a glass of water. The next table we approached was empty of people. Here, knives were pointed at us, slivers of cheese attached to the end of them. Some nice, some ashed, some blue. As we were drifting away, the woman from behind the stall grabbed me by the arm and leaned in, whispering, urgent, into my ear: ‘Keet ist tot! Keet ist tot!’

I tried to fix her with my iciest green stare, to see through her, to understand what she meant by such a cryptic message. But suddenly she was away, serving a table full of people the Fibonacci sequence on crispbread. ‘A Shepherds’ Cheese,’ she was saying, not a trace of the German accent in her voice.

I caught up with Nix and DeeBee.

‘Did you see that? Did you see that lady?’ I was breathless; they were disinterested. They were eating Triple Cream Brie.

‘Here, try this,’ said DeeBee. The man behind this stall raised his head to look at me, then took a knife and fixed me a wafer of Triple Cream, handing it to me with great ceremony. When I brought it to my nose to smell it, I noticed something unusual. In the runny, creamy centre of the cheese was knifed a scrawling letter D. I glance up at the man, but, strangely, he was gone.

‘It’s surprisingly salty, don’t you think?’ Nix was saying. Triple Cream Brie never lasts long in my presence, so despite the presence of perhaps a significant clue in the form of the D, I ate it anyway. And yes, it was surprisingly salty, but creamy and rich.

The next table we went to contained no cheese, which was suspect in itself (this, of course, being a cheese show). Here I was given a piece of glacé fig with the letter A engraved in it. Which I ate.

By then, Nix, DeeBee and I had glasses of wine in our hands. The noise of the room was growing. A clump of function musicians were strangling jazz standards off to one side, as more and more people streamed in through the sea of pokies outside the door. I was unsure about the state of the mission. Everyone I looked at could potentially be a spy, aware of our status, following our every move. The clues were coming thick and fast and strange. By then I had collected and eaten a letter E, another D, an N, a U and an S. I was beginning to suspect that Nix and DeeBee were falling into a cheese trance. This was all part of the plot – the danger. We knew it. We had known it all along.

We came to a table were I found myself swooning over a goats camembert called Misty Valley (with an I scraped into it), while Nix was swooning over something called Merricks Mist. I could feel the cheese trance taking hold of my brain. The whole mission could be in danger. I made the covert signal to DeeBee and Nix that we needed to regroup and we withdrew to a quiet vestibule. We lay our cheese-filled bodies onto some luxurious couches and supped at our wine. As far as missions go, this surely was an enjoyable one, but would it be a successful one? Using our coded language in case we were being monitored, we discussed the progress of the mission.

‘One of us needs to get a car,’ (meaning: we need to snap out of it, keep our heads cool).

‘Yeah, then we could go away for a weekend somewhere. Visit cheeseries, wineries, go for walks,’ (meaning: when we go back in we need to keep our eyes and ears open and watch each other’s backs).

‘If I got out of work on a Monday, we could leave on Saturday and stay for two nights somewhere,’ (meaning: remember what HQ said, remember our instructions, remember our mission).

We re-entered the Palladium re-invigorated and focussed. Between the three of us, we collected an H in a piece of fresh goats curd, a T in a soft washed rind, another I in a piece of Spiced Pear Paste, a difficult found E in the most delicious Discovery Ashed Blue (a cheese so runny, the E almost slipped away), and, after much searching, a K in a shaving of Heidi Farm Gruyere. Then the trailed dried up and so had our glasses. We refilled them and made our way back to the quiet vestibule, just in time to escape a drunk woman dancing – probably one of our enemy’s spies. Again we spoke in code.

‘Why do you think people go to the casino?’ (meaning: is that it? Do you think we should report back to HQ?).

‘I bet that sound of someone winning the pokies is just a recording to make people keep playing so that they think they’ll win,’ (meaning: what can all these letters mean? They don’t make any sense to me: D-A-E-D-N-U-S-I-H-T-I-E-K?’).

‘Isn’t that someone we went to uni with?’ (meaning: maybe it’s a code. Maybe we need to unscramble it).

‘Yeah, it is. But what’s her name? What is her name?’ (meaning: oh my god. It’s backwards! K-E-I-T-H-I-S-U-N-D-E-A-D! Keith-is-undead! That’s what it’s telling us!).

‘Yeah, what is her name?’ (meaning: oh my god, you’re right. Keith is undead. That’s freaky).

And so ends our specialist cheese show mission. We got the code, unscramble the message, completed the mission and escaped unharmed into the bright winter sunlight. The cheese trance was itching its way back up our spines. We walked down the river, away from the house of sin, away from dancing drunk spies and the cheese and the wine and the nameless eaters. But the clue, the strange message, was pulsing around our brains:

Keith is undead! Keith is undead! Keith is undead!