Pepsi Bears and Other Stories by Anson Cameron

sneering monarch over the many dunghills such as Goulburn, Brisbane and Auckland, she is cap-in-hand suckhole to any northern hemisphere notable. But on this night she discovers, through Amelia, how good it feels to spurn the gods. Suddenly, with this DiCaprio story doing the rounds, Sydney seems a place A-list internationals are desperate to get into, and it makes the town feel good to bar their entry. DiCaprio’s mojo becomes Amelia’s. Hollywood’s mojo becomes Sydney’s, Sydney thinks.
    So in the two years since the inhospitable spurning of that boy-faced Hollywood hero, Amelia has been invited to and photographed at all the openings and closings and comings and goings and anniversaries and exhibitions in a proud town. She’s become one of Sydney’s muses and only comes alive at night now in a five-star festivity after six lines of coke and a pill or two.
    Her family is concerned at the turn her life has taken. Every time she appears in the social pages draped over some designer or rapper with his own boutique, the magazine lies open for days on the kitchen table of herparents’ house for them to grieve over and wince at in passing. What to do? How to put the genie of celebrity back in the bottle? She was studying Fine Arts before this dreadful DiCaprio fellow burdened her with such plausible cool she fell for it herself. She was a serious anatomical artist who could spend days drawing the wing of a pallid cuckoo or a Bogong moth, before that bastard stormed off into the night with his entourage leaving her status impossibly enhanced.
    When their parents hear of Chris’ trip to Nicaragua they think it might do Amelia good to accompany him. First of all seeing Chris help the poor children of that desecrated place might give her perspective. Then an exploration into the cloud forests where she can reconnect with the natural world and rediscover her love of wild things and of capturing them with a pencil or a brush. They beg him to take her. They want her to see the fêted wildlife of the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve; the quetzal and macaw, the puma and jaguar. They reason that when magical creatures such as these are set alongside such dull creatures as the fashion designer, the magazine editor, the photographer and the gallery owner, they will trounce them and maul them and bring Amelia back to sanity.
    Her brother doubts the power of the quetzal and the puma to trounce the celebrities of Sydney, but he knows she has become a drug-addled socialite, so anything is worth a try. Thus he asks her to come with him to Nicaragua. And to his delight the crested caracara today does seem to have inflamed her.

    Chris has travelled widely and is respectful of other cultures and therefore sees the ambush and slaughter of Nicaraguan peasants as an in-house affair that you have to be Nicaraguan to understand and/or condemn. Thus he has shaken the hands of the Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation one by one and given them health bars. Knowing they do not speak English, he has waggled the bars at them and said, ‘Health bars. Muchos healthy. Very special goodly good. Make im fit. Make im strong.’ And pointed at his hunched bicep. In the dark the Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation have sniffed the health bars and laid them aside.
    The Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation are one of the many fragments of political ideology that chipped off the great stone of Nicaraguan independence when the United States brought down the sledgehammer of invasion in the nineties. They have haunted the vast parks of the Central Highlands ever since, patrolling the cloud forests, loosing automatic fire on fleeing jaguars and dreaming of a Marxist utopia stretching from Vancouver to Uruguay in which Red Soldiers stroll the streets of the cities with beautiful American blondes on leashes.
    Though it is clear the Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation can’t speak English, conversation between the three