Matty stares angrily at his pint of beer, “$11.60, seriously?” His friends can tell that he is a few dollars away from one of his infamous anti-Perth rants. A bar chick brings over some menus for the table. Matty stares at the Steak Sandwich: $32, and he knows it will come with a pitiful handful of chips. Matty needs a moment to compose himself.
“So sick of this shit guys, did you know in Melbourne you can get a pub meal for $10? Any day of the week?” His friends know what’s coming. They rarely call Matty up on his outlandish statements. In Matty’s eyes, Melbourne is the land of milk and honey: where pints are $5 and every coffee is god damn award winning shit. A strong opinion for a man that has only been over the ditch twice for a couple of Footy weekends.
On Matty’s break at work, he scrolls through the Jetstar website, checking the price of flights to Melbourne, “$400 one way! Perth is a god damn remote galaxy”. After work, Matty has a few too many drinks and starts rambling to his workmates about joining him on the trip of a lifetime. His half-cocked plan is to drive over the Nullarbor in his ‘88 Mitsubishi Lancer and they will start a new life, in the paradise of Melbourne. They humour him, but it’s a familiar chicken dance, and they have simply stopped believing it.
Matty pays $40 for a taxi from Mount Lawley to Victoria Park. He explains to the taxi driver that if he was in Melbourne he could’ve just jumped on a tram. The taxi driver wishes he jumped on the tram. Saddened by his existence in Perth, Matty goes home and googles pictures of the MCG while slowly masturbating. One day he will make the move… one day.
