The Cross

By Joseph Ridgewell

A second instalment of the Ridgwell travel/escape saga finds our lad in Sydney, bruised by his Mexican escapade and with compadre Ron on the run.

He makes his way to Kings Cross, a run-down but charismatic neighbourhood of backpacker hotels, bars, hookers and drifters, and finds a berth in St Elmo’s boarding house – home of former witch Rosalie Norton.

Low on funds, he takes a job as a catering assistant in a private hospital, where he has to slave under the command of Dagmar – ‘an incorrigible bully, a sadistic fucker who had me by the balls from the off’. Cut loose from the tight bromance of his relationship with Ron, Joe stumbles haplessly, fuelled by beer and oppressed by the blistering heat of the Antipodean sun, between the females who populate this story – the witch Estelle, the lapdancer Amber Ace – and is haunted by his encounter with the Aboriginal teenage junkie Bianca. But before long he is rescued by a chance meeting – in a bar of course – with Schooner, a native who takes him out of Sydney and into Australia’s mysterious outback….

A brilliant follow up to his debut Burrito Deluxe, an atmosphere of doom hangs over this tale. Joseph Ridgwell has a unique voice, telling tales of lives lived in the underbelly in a prose that crackles with energy – aware of the towers of wealth and commerce that glitter in the background, but ever disenchanted and on the run.