There's a gurgle in the corner, small bubbles of air decompressing upwards. Then, the hum, almost comforting and invisible, a bass thrum vibrating behind high walls and under chair legs. The veins in the faux leather are stretched, flattened, submissioned. The gaussian noise of the plastic arms is just enough to grip the DNA sheddings of a thousand wizened arms. Labwork.
This fabricated comfort, this blanket of civility, this smother of passivity. Textureless, this vacuum of friction tiptoes around the horror on the other side of the wall. Lives winnowed, futures narrowed, histories blurred. The air and ourselves are newly conditioned, re-regulated, streamlined into submission. It's all good because it's all that's left. Comfort is frictionless, this slippery slope.
Overhead wonders soar by, trailing crystal fumes, etchasketching the sky. That way there's home, this way there's an older mystery. The clutter clatter of hard leaves on frozen soil, consecrated by dogs and Datsuns. These waiting bays, these resting places accumulate all pieces of the day. Piling up little stresses and discards. Scattering evidences of petty crimes by wind and the growling turbulence of impatient cars. Frictioned, weakened and vectored smaller day by day, they find the cavities of suburbia. Rolling in, trickling down, filling up. A new crust of sedimentary garbage forms, a new soil from our soiled lives. A wanton weed bed, ready to spawn.
Loose trolleys rumbling toward parked cars. Light pools make shadows for the boys to hide. Among this grid garden of orderly asphalt, remnants of broken groceries crackle underfoot. Save 40%. Price Match Guarantee™. Here's where we've come, here's where we're parked after all these years. We're not pretending this time, the clock has ticked on, the fuse burned down. The itchy screech of rust and friction welcomes my hands. Faster to shut it up. Push the trolley, fill the cage, empty the net that's snared us here. There's a list in some pocket. A naming of things, a tickboxery of boredom. Vanilla this, grams of that, a ripe squeeze of those. These are the makings of something, ingredients for a stewing suburban malaise. We used to play house: plastic tea sets and cordial, misters and visitors, talking curtain colours over crustless triangles. These must be grownup importances, the aspirational decisions we wanted to make one day. Now, the boy-men are hiding in their dark cars. Slurping coffee and ash, watching the traffic stutter past, waiting for a sign not neon. A trolley screech inches closer.
Don't be afraid. The dark is a nothing, a space waiting to be filled. Colour it with your somethings, smear it red and bright. Paint in your scarecrows, the crucifix and the faith. Olden day dark silences were punctured by strange creaks, a foreign language to me then. No amount of deciphering, unpuzzling, formed a picture from that soundscape mysterium. Toes curling in the rough shag, fingers senseless in the cold, waiting, gritting, not long now. The unfamiliar soundscapes from other floors unleashed different visions. Imagined demons overwhelming reason and physics, a fantasyland of homicide and catastrophe. Tonight, there's a blue echo of TV spilling into the dark. Some sports drama being scalpeled and retold. Instinct reactions slowmowed and pretend-explained. Victory found, revenge avenged. You're living their drama, giving everything to the moment, unconscious and complete. The ball rolls, tomorrow calls, let's bounce, you say.
Crouching there, masked and robed, arcing that knife, you're all bark and bustle. So ready to pounce and clamber, so ready to romance, so ready for the fury and smother. Back when nothing mattered but you and me, it was always you. Goldeneyed, dark like dangerous waters, so coy, so tangled, your games were all known, all entered into, all played and replayed. Now, the tumult smooths, the moments familiar, the storms semi-transparent. Put away the blade, dear. You've cut me where it counts, you've got me right here, this love is for life.
Quick blink flicker, here comes the light as here comes the dark. The white strobe behind you makes me blink and think Duran. 1984 just in time, I wasn't looking for how it was done, wasn't yet perving for the special effects and fakery. How they did it didn't matter. That new world of make believe was enough. Up in the girders, smoke danced through light beams, still a thrill, all possibility and impossibility together in ecstatic moments. All sweated out in the cool eucalyptus night, miles high, unencumbered yet.
On my desk, an orange row of lights, blinking. Notice me. Do something. Fix me. in my pocket, a beep, pulse, demand. At the doorbell, chaos signalled. Incoming. Everything's a klaxxon. But at least I can find my friends. I see you coming, a dot on a map, closer, closer to the patterned hello. We won't be here some day, and that's OK. Another hand will open our door, tinier feet will scuff the wall and tumble up stairs, yelling. Other fires will blacken and spit. We're borrowing space, filling time, fretting about transient incidentals. Tomorrow, hurry tomorrow. The photos start to curl in like our fathers, wrinkling and dim in the sun. Their confidence has been worked over and softened up. Didn't expect this, they admit quietly between wake and sleep. Their yearnings, lusts and nexts are past, their stories highlight reels of the forgotten in-between days. Their plans are done now, glory redefined. Our exuberances, our milestones, our half-believed goals will happen and evaporate too. Others will follow behind, impatient, sniggering, not understanding why two gray people would want to hold hands as they walk to the very end, together.
The white noise and gossip merge together. Minor slights and affronts, sterilized, ionized, sanctified in the static. Low private giggles echo off reports and the foreboding specimen bottles, amber, white, slime green, toxic with pessimism. Inside, questions echo dull and short and clip boarded. Interviews of organs, symptoms, brushoffs...detective work. In the walls, the files silently wilt. Diagnoses, observations, histories of phantom aches and unexpected chemistries. Acute, benign, and the other. My mother ran this place, walked this carpet under my feet for 8 years, smiling, white noised and helpful, surrounded by evidence of disease. A world reduced to a cube, a life reduced to checkbox percentages. Grateful, cured patients brought small gifts, a silk, a sweet, a dried flower — offerings of relief to the administrative altar. Today, there's no trace of her here, only files bearing her invisible, caring fingerprints.
Across the crowded room, projected with tv light, you flicker red, green, blue. We were only watching each other, waiting for the credits. Then, under the streetlight, the end of the approach, you bowled me over. Hands bound, sweating, squeezing to mask the tremble. That summer night, I walked the square kilometre from boy to man. A birthday hystolysis. Later, in the dark, our separate beds were joined only by our hands, a four foot chastity, pretending to be older, scared to be older.
The ice calls at night. Aching and groaning. Pressures unimaginable, squeezing and forcing and expanding, slowly creating a barrier crust to belching snowmobiles and the sun's cold whimsy. Metres below, the water hesitates between liquid and gel, dark, sluggish, shock crystallized by a northern wind and retreating sun. There's no hope down here, no maybes, no possibilities. Heartbeats slow, hunger dulls, movement settles to stillness. The fish sleep, half mass, half life, wide-eyed and dull blank, rocked by the moon's gravity. They sleep knowing the thaw will come, opening the frost seal, bringing oxygen, hooks and slashing knives. They sleep, already knowing the end. Meanwhile the ice, it aches, it groans in the night. The howl calls across the lake, off granite and maple, "Come child, step out, just a little further..."
"I'll do it again sometime", he says, looking up and out to the horizon. "Buy a new ETSA car, a baby blue Ford Fairlane stationwagon, put the dog in the back, haul the kids down to the beach, playing some Elvis. Aldinga, Henley or Glenelg...I don't know. Go for a walk and breathe the good air. Get a little sun and whole lot of goodness. Maybe get some ice cream, a flake in a cone, dripping, goopy down to the elbows. Enough blathering, but I'll do it again sometime, yes I will. Are you coming along? We can stop and park in the shade, give the dog a drink from the bottle, roll down the windows and listen to the gulls. Smell the lead in the air, the salt on your arm, the Pacific stretching to Antarctica right in front of us. It's bright out here, and those yahoos with the footy on too loud are spoiling everything. It's just like at the Port. isn't it? C'mon, let's go for a walk, grab the stumps would you? Don't forget the leash and the esky. Down and over the sand dunes, out onto the beach, white, wide, half empty and blistering. Good thing you've got your thongs and a hat. Here's good, it's nice and flat, the ball will bounce good. Hey, set up the wickets, measure out the pitch. Who's going in first? Don't bother with the sunscreen, it'll just wash off. Go get your head wet and then we'll see. Here, take the dog. Aahhhh. No, I'm not going to wear shorts. Look at that one there, would you - who does he think he is? Alright, Alright. Where's my hat? Get the bat and tennis ball, let's go, yes, you can bat first. Who's playing wicketkeeper? Yeah, I'll take some of that sunscreen. Here, slap it on... I'm going back there. Down under, one day. I'll do it again sometime, yes I will."
1977. Suddenly, unbelievably, at the end of our street one morning: something carved through earth. Curved walls towering over me like a battle trench, earthy and crumbling and good. Six feet under, and there was a coldness. Dark layers, root tentacles, mini-Nargun rocks, swallowing and blanketing under all the world's sound. This core earth, slashed open to air and sun and fingers for the first time ever. We swarmed up and down, casual armies in epic battles, always defeated by dusk and our mother's call. I don't remember boredom, only questions and structure and new carpet burns. Weeks later I stood on what was vacant. The trench, now filling, settling, recompressing with soil and stones and halfworms. Something buried, something fixed. Darkness returned, a void filled, a summer played.
A nail pummelled wall, erupting through to the other side. A surface fracture, woodgrain outraged, splintered, knots undone. Unexpectedly brittle, spiked and undoable, these shards of once living tissue. Cutting across the grain is always harder. Tougher, shreddy, dangerous. Muscle fights back, intuition warns, a secret Pine Gap for behaviour. The chainsaw screams, biting bark, metal through crust. The trunk that would never move, never sway, never flinch under my climbing feet, labours open, screaming, to reveal the ring tale of its life. Winter, summer, bloom, death... a concentric inking of imperceptible growth, stretching up to tower over our roof, tunnelling down through our sewers, spiralling around water pipes, fingering for moisture. "One day this could be a table," you say, dusting splashes of white eucalyptus from my hair. This one a crutch, this one a coffin, this one a crucifix. Sticky woodblood, clear sap, stopped up everything, vainly. We were too strong, we who planted, nurtured, watered it for 15 years. You are ours to cull, we thought. Years later, cut wood is the aroma of honesty, of hard-won exhaustion, of real world truth. A foreignness to everything plastic that surrounds me. A call to remember what my ring tales could be.
Smaller, quieter, fragile...the metrics of minimalism. As I watch my father disappear into himself, I wonder, when did he first feel it? Out in the morning fog, their boots half sink, satisfyingly, into the celtic mud. Deer ran here, pagans too, once. The ball scuttered sodden and grimly heavy, but lighter when you know you're at the goal line. The tackles came flying through the white whisps, with a yell and thump. Even among friends, no mercy spared. The field was wreathed, wrapped by white moving walls. Sound echoed inward, as if this moment was to stay sacred in the satin sacristy. They were invisibled from the world, from hunger, Master's Ruler, and kneecaps. Burdens annulled, that morning was their universe. They were giants, tearing up the field, fumbling for glory and pride, laughing and cursing, endless, free. Over on the half-back line, a younger brother never stopped to wonder what it was all about. Right now it was all about the itchy sweater, the tight nip of old shoes, the scary blank white fog and that Mary at the convent school. It was the morning after the caeili, and his lifeline had just been set a new tangent. Knowing only a life of pride and strength and leading, now this insidiousness. Minimalism. Smallness. It was a lifetime and two continents away, but still it came, creeping day by day, a new fog to find him again.
Under the boardroom table, a current of meaning astroglides from chair to chair. Above, the meat puppets perform. You're in, you're on the outs, but you'll never know unless you're in the know. Above board, all seems passive and swell. A few gentle disagreements, natch. Fluid segues and quick backtracks. Back down below, the writhing contortions happen unseen, toes curling, ulcers ripening. Someone's gonna lose an ass here. Across the city, in rooms just like this, experience becomes meaningless and reputations evaporate. Behind the fake walnut doors, fake leather chairs hold insecurity bags under fake vibrating lights. This is no place for originality. This is no place to live. On the windowsill, dust dead bugs. Under the table, hidden fingernail scratches of fear. Out the window, a cold sun hides behind darkening clouds. There's a storm coming and there's no man here to face it.
Fields became communities, dirt grew lawn and my books were hand wrapped and taped. Our heads were filled, nooked and crannied with last century's expectations. Homebound we raced over the brink, limitless, eyes clear to the ocean. The brown grass crunched under like a snow I couldn't remember. The overhead buzz always a heavy, pulsar of heat, making the distance warble and watery. First the dry brown crickets, then the locusts, a crunchy, dusty pestilence eating and dying everywhere. The petrolead in the air, that sweet musk of mechanical muscle, of real work going on here. Screendoors against mozzies, windows against dust, my name carved in and glittering guiltily with a fake diamond, my first permanence. Out of the city, the majestic roadtrains ruled, their bullroarer watersacks humming a lower frequency at 90 kilometres an hour. Their drivers, mountainmen of singlets, Akubras and hard boots, winked and drank and spat red dust. 'Caught Marsh, bowled Lillee' was the victory we all wanted. That landshark with the perfect form. Pacing first, then slowly rising, accelerating and exploding in a fierce attack of honesty and intimidation. Glorious. We couldn't dream how hard it was, just wanting to be at the top of that run, accelerating in, a dry hot wind to our open faces.
It was a simple place, unembarrassed with pretension, as if invented just for him. Salt, dust, formica over hardwood. Thousands had sat here, face to face, fork to knife, questions to answers. Sons with lovers, loners with strangers, bankers with secrets. The perfect setting for what it's all about. "Time will not save you when the time comes," he half whispered to an empty glass, dregslimed and cold. Its small tears dripped slowly to the table, puddling. Grand plans, big places, games and trips and months and souls...all long lost, but leaving still that tree strength, plumb certainty and an unconqueable optimism. He hard won it in the hardest places. Before sunrise, aching, cold, alone. Wood, nails, hammering on. Measure, cut, builder man. "And then the whole world falls on you", said still with a smile. Rough truths he sanded over so I wouldn't get splintered. I'm ten again, sharing a table with my dad.
It should be tablestakes for adulthood. That sweet poisonous blend of freshness and fear is the ideal preparation for your next meeting, your next 3rd date, your final day at the office. When there's no rulebook there's only reflex, and with no muscle memory for stress, we usually opt for carbs. I learned the hard way that familiarity breeds contempt, especially peering over the lid of a PowerPoint. Raisinheads. Bulletpoints. Arial bold. Thoughtlessness and carelessness shine bright at 2400 lumen. Impatient, incredulous, I sat in the dark, 1500 miles from home. Doodling despair, promising never again, planning dinner's carbs.
Coal becomes an ember, black cold to fiery red. Smoke becomes fireball. A key becomes a puzzle. The smallest things are everything in this unknown world. Half-imagined clues and glimpses of madness under beds and in back sheds. Years in the making, layer over layered hurt, silence met out with hardness, this is the recipe for this feast of darkness. The insulting ordinariness of another sunny day taunts and pushes us on to the next. There is no quenching this snakespark racing towards the keg. Relentlessly and admirably efficient, I see it only when I hear it, sensing the man fade and fade, a transparency ebbing in. Slowly the hollow grows, combusting on itself, turning red to black, a spark to dust. What comes next is already here, just louder, engulfing, scorching.
Back when I believed in eternity, all was good. The flimflam of life was minor, the potentials and challenges unconsidered. Back when old was a lifetime away, unbelieved and foreign, the rules were unfathomable and petty. Back when dreams were possible, the pathways were invisible and unregarded. Primitive goals were easily breached, accomplishments were peelaway gold stars, everything meaningful hastily hidden and futured. Back when I believed in forever, urgency was no more than a Sunday night weight, a fabricated inconvenience. By the time it was real, it was too late to use. Eternity ends at the first xray. Back when I believed in us, there was nothing we couldn't create. We used fragments as figments, igniting, fusing into a mismatched, unsynced whole. Crow's feet and aches for trying, a refuelled belief for succeeding.