Literare Experimenta

Atherton Gardens

2009-07-15T20:12:00.001+10:00

He checked his watch; it was 6pm. He had been walking for two hours. His stomach growled. He was starving and cold. Between two tower blocks to the north, the sun was dipping low, casting long black shadows. The sky looked bleak and threatening. A wind was starting to pick up; curling yellowed newspapers in little eddies around the empty entrance ways of the buildings. He then felt the first few spits of rain. A storm was coming in. His purloined overcoat would provide little cover. Despite the rising sense of dread at being lost in a storm in a veritable shit hole, he tried to calm himself. A storm would hamper the authorities' search. Witnesses were hard to come by when the wet set in.

He passed a giant slab of concrete jutting up from the parkland where it had violently been embedded. Peering up, he saw a huge cavity in the side of a building where it had come loose and crashed to the ground. Now it just lay there. Weeds were growing up through the cracks in its surface, covering the buckled metal framework exposed beneath. No effort made to clean it up or to repair the naked section of building that remained. He could see the shadows of people moving around in the shell of the room. They were tending a small fire, feeding it foam sections of a smashed-up couch. Their shadows rose and fell in the dim light.

He passed an overturned shopping trolley. Two of its wheels had been wrenched off and its wire frame was being slowly corroded by rust. In the middle distance he saw a children's playground. The jungle gym lay on their side in a distorted mockery of its original intent - a twisting mass of metalwork. Several rungs rose up from the ground as though making one last attempt to regain their former structure before abandoning the idea and relegating themselves to a fate of damp soil and weeds.

Icy water started to drip down his neck, and run down his spine, sending chills to his core. Shivering, he pulled his overcoat more tightly around him. Puddles were already forming on the walkway. Water cascaded in falls down the vertical sides of the buildings and splashed up from the over-worked drains. As he walked around the buildings, he noticed a basic system of ordering. Each building had a giant red letter painted on its north-south corner. He was nearing ‘Sector G – Atherton Gardens’.

- from a work in progress, working title ‘The Tect’.

The Grey Dawn Caper

2008-09-27T20:11:00.002+10:00

It lay there on the bed, a note carved in blood. I didn't need to read it, I knew what it said. Instead I walked purposefully to the bedroom curtain, tore it open, and there she was, two floors below me. Flash of cherry blossom lipstick, smeared across her cheek, her hand pressed against the rear windscreen of the black car, palm towards me, the life lines indistinguishable. Then the engine was gunned, and the car tore away, the tailpipe spewing exhaust which merged with the gray morning fog. She was gone and that was that. I let the curtain fall back down, smothering the outline of my own palm left on the cold hard window pane.

The Finest of Species

2008-09-27T19:59:00.003+10:00

She was the finest of species. A magnificent find. Too rare even for a zoo. I kept her in the front room. I admitted no guests, such were the precautions. Food was optimum, the finest caviar, the purest of oils and sweet meats. A delicate combination of yoghurt and medicinal herbs. I cried for an entire day when the mutation took hold. Her disposition changed, became frightful. The last night I awoke just after midnight. She had gnawed through the wall of the bed chamber. Her bite, a pure anaesthetic, meant I came to consciousness when it was already too late - she had entered through my trachea and moved swiftly until wholly feasting on the jugular. As I faded I dreamt of angels and dead branches in snow.

Two No Trumps

2008-09-27T19:52:00.000+10:00

The tea tasted acrid. Mr Jengles smiled, 'Do take another sip. Really draw it down.'
'You've poisoned it,' I replied.
'But of course,' said Jengles. 'It's time you were removed.'
He was right. I gulped it down, my Adam's Apple bobbing. I smiled back at him, my teeth stained with blood.
'I think I want to kiss you,' I told him. Mr Jengles looked alarmed, his manacles quivered.
'But... the poison...'
'Exactly. My disappearance is a trump, it takes one equal with it.'
'And that equal is...'
'Exactly.' His eyes were clenched tight as I spat the stagnant blood in his face. He died a minute later. I'd swapped his antidote for spider venom the evening before as he played Bridge on the upper deck.

The Italian Fruit Addler

2008-09-27T19:50:00.001+10:00

The phone rang. El Chico, my Mexican contact. He had news. There'd been a fly-over the night before, two of the boys had been pinched, and the third was halfway across the border by now, heading to a hook-up with his family. They'd left a semi-circle of lemons around the body. Lemons without skins, perfectly peeled, freshly preserved. It had the locals spooked.

Priorities

2008-08-10T19:20:00.006+10:00

I couldn't remember when I had last shaved. Looking in the mirror, I barely recognised myself. My eyes were dark, sunken rings. My skin was dry and aged. My stubble was flecked with gray. My work had cost me so much. So much more than I realised.

My family had become ghosts - swathing in and out of focus, they mouthed silent words at me. I stood at the kitchen counter, scoffing burnt toast, talking via video conference with the Board of Directors. They were all wearing spotless white Keffiyehs with black bands.

The next day I awoke before dawn. I lathered my face and shaved myself clean. I dressed in my best suit and matching blue tie. I kissed my wife, her body warm and kind, and then left the house as the sun was cresting the rooftops of the nearby houses.

I walked briskly, whistling, swinging my umbrella. My mobile rang away in my pocket, but I never once made the effort to answer it.

I took the express lift up to the top floor - the electronic lift numbers whizzed by in a blur. Every wall in my office was made of polished glass. I could see the harbour and the neon street lights far below. The first commuters were bustling down the wet oily pavements.

The glass gave way with the second swing of my leather and chrome chair and I let the momentum of it carry me out. I watched the myriad glass shards suspended about me and I watched how my chair did was buffeted in the air currents as I hurtled down.

I hoped that the news of my death wouldn't upset company productivity in the long term.

Third-World Country

2008-07-14T19:58:00.003+10:00

The delivery van had one unusual aspect – that of a small-scale satellite dish. I watched as it tracked my movements. I’d take three steps forward and it would rotate and adjust its telemetry accordingly. I moved backwards, it followed. I crept towards a tree and hid myself behind its meagre foliage. The dish followed. I furtively slid beneath a vacant park bench – I watched in awe as the dish locked in my position by lowering its y-axis. I was apprehended not three minutes later. The border police had been onto me for sometime – they’d picked up Franco, my border compadre on a trumped-up weapons smuggling charge – and I didn’t stand a chance with the grenades and light-arms bag I was carrying.

“Mr Markovich.”

2007-01-27T21:24:00.004+11:00

I arrived to find the house empty, darker than an ace deck of spades. There was no sound, except the caw-cawing of a crow perched on a nearby fence post. Rusty barbed wire ran along the ground half-buried in the sand, a grim reminder of some dark past the house was yet to surrender up to me.

I rapped on the door, once. The second time it creaked open, cobwebs tearing apart, and dust falling in the dim light from the windows. Dusk was on its way. I pulled out my torch and holding it up at shoulder height, I made an inspection of the downstairs landing. A dusty antique chest on chest, riddled with termites, stood on the verge of collapse, to the left there hung a picture, yellowed and flaking in a cracked frame. Studying it under torchlight I could see it was Mr Frankenheimer. Before the war. He was smiling at the camera, as he shook the hand of another man whom I didn’t recognise. The man had a monocle and a scar that ran from the corner of his mouth up to his eye. The scar pulled his smile back in a contortionist’s rictus. I’d sooner shoot and ask questions later. I got the distinct feeling that this man I was peering at across the passage of time was the man behind this whole set-up. It was an instinct, a crying out in my gut but I’d long learned to listen to those cries. I fingered the wound still red and raised on my forehead – a reminder of the last time I’d ignored such instincts.

The door behind me banged shut. There was a click of a gun being cocked, and a match being struck simultaneously. I turned, my hooded eyes falling on the blackened shape of a man, wide shoulders under a fedora.

‘Mr Markovich I presume,’ the shape spoke.

‘Who’s asking?’

‘From where I’m standing you’re in no position to be asking such questions. You seem to value your life at a low premium. All the better for me then for I am here to extinguish you.’

‘How much for the liquidation?’ I asked, stalling, my hand curling around a candle stick holder balanced on a side table behind me.

‘Oh, that’s quite enough of the questions. Here,’ he threw me some rope. “Tie your wrists.’

Image courtesy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordi_Bernet

Five minutes to five

2007-01-05T21:41:00.000+11:00

It was now five minutes to five. The disc jockey stretched back in his chair, the back creaking under his weight. The record played its song and three minutes passed in a mellow drum and thumping jazz beat, the trumpets occasionally cutting his thoughts in two.

He corrected his sunglasses as the last refrains soared, sustained then faded. He lent over and grabbed the desk mic.

“It’s two minutes to five and the air is alive with electricity no one turned on. The sky is alive with anticipation. Could this be the night? Could this be the night they come? You’re listening to XRR and I’ll be your host for this evening.”

The handprint

2006-12-24T21:37:00.000+11:00

The handprint was painted in dried blood. It had congealed and set by the morning. It marked a passing, a suspended moment in time since gone. A reminder of human umbrage. It was stark and contrasted against the pale fading white of the wallpaper. There was no leading trail or gentle sliding off at the fingertips of the print. Set in blood in solid primitive form. I really had to get my kids some proper oil paints next time I was down at the art store. Perhaps on Saturday…

The Herd

2006-08-15T21:44:00.003+10:00

I stood on the creaking porch of my old weather-beaten wooden guard hut and looked out over the oil rig and the rock quarry beside it. The sun was setting behind the column of dunes which dipped and rolled along the horizon. There was a different scent in the air. The usual red dust on my lips tasted of dirt and some sort of metal like aluminium, an effect of the air surrounding the mine. It was mixed with the smell of fresh sawn timber and crushed eucalyptus leaves – so fresh and close they could have been in my hand. But there was something else, animal and brutal, like polluted smoke out past the shadows reverberating with the evening coolness.

I had guarded this drilling site for three years now, hewing out a living in a wooden hut. In the kerosene-lit evenings I worked my way through piles of yellowing paperbacks. I subsisted on the provisions from the weekly supply truck. Nothing glamorous, it was a simple life.

The oil company had taken me on as a guard after environmental protesters had tried to vandalise the rig. The axe scars in the wooden posts of the blasting station were still visible and their spray-painted words ringing the concrete feet were luminescent even after being covered over in black paint. ‘End the drilling now’ they said.

The protesters returned last month, protesting the opening of another rig in the desert to the south. Their message this time was more ominous: ‘Stop the drilling before the desert fights back’. I had been forced to fire a warning shot from my rifle that night and a scuffle had broken out between me and their leader.

‘Soon you’ll realise the damage you’re perpetrating here,’ he had shouted. ‘You’ll be called to account for the damage that’s been done. One day you’ll be called to witness.’

With a lucky punch I had broken his jaw and smashed in his front teeth. The authorities arrived from the border town ten minutes away and the fight was broken up. The protesters, whom had chained themselves to the hydraulics of the rig were cut free, arrested and dragged away.

Last week the clouds over the oil rig had taken on a different hue. The tangerine orange and spring apple hues had deepened. Tonight the sky was a bushfire red, all fire and sparks across the horizon, malevolent colours that made the hairs on my arms prickle like pins. I pondered the painted words, yet to be painted over: ‘…before the desert fights back’. The thought chilled me. ‘One day you’ll be called to witness…’ I broke out in a cold sweat.

I pulled off my shirt and trousers, slung them over the old wooden chair and climbed into bed. Turning off the kerosene lamp, I heard sirens out past the hills that skirted the desert dunes. They sounded far away but their source disturbed me. I lay awake for hours before slipping into a restless sleep.

‘Get your skates on. You’re not going to believe this.’ Walt was the site’s foreman and keen supporter of the drilling and the employment it brought to the local community. Walt had a way about him, a tone which was not used to being ignored. It was strange to see him on a Saturday night when the mine was closed.

‘Coming,’ I said.

Pulling on a singlet, I met him at the door to the hut. Walt was silhouetted against the red desert sky, charred black where it met the horizon and tinged with a brown like dried blood. Walt took me down the narrow track that led into the quarry. The oil rig stood off to our left. Like a skeleton of some deformed giant its shadow cut across the quarry. I heard the siren wail again, but it was closer this time. The sound echoed and shook the walls of the quarry and rocks tumbled from the lip above us, trailing piles of dust. Walt grabbed my shoulder pulling me to a stop.

‘Look at that,’ he said. Awe and disbelief was in his voice.

Twenty metres further down the trail there stood a giant grey elephant as tall as a house. An elephant calf appeared from behind a rock outcrop and huddled near its mother for protection. The elephant must have heard us for it leaned back on its hind legs and let out an incredible wail, sending ripples of sound around the confines of the quarry, causing rocks and pebbles to loosen and trickle and tumble down to the dirt at our feet. I was in shock, my legs rubbery, powerless. I stood frozen.

The elephant wailed again and started towards us.

‘Let’s get the hell out of here,’ Walt shouted.

Suddenly I was caught, my feet stuck in a sticky black molasses. The ground of the quarry was giving way, crumbling into a giant tar pit. It was burping and swelling around my feet. I looked at Walt and he had fallen to his knees which were black and sticky with the tar. It clung to his hands.

‘Help me!’ he pleaded, his eyes wide with terror.

He pulled at his left boot trying to free himself from the tar and his foot came away. The boot was sucked under and a moment later it vanished. He stepped backwards and fell. The tar splashed up around him threatening to pull him under.

‘Help!’ He reached up at me, tugging at my trousers. I gripped his hand and pulled as hard as I could, my arm muscles burning with the strain and my tendons popping.

The tar was up to Walt’s chest now, submerging him into the thick, dark, repulsive ooze. A terrible smell of methane gas like sour rotten eggs was all around me. Walt’s neck was black and sticky with the stuff.

The last thing I saw was his cold grey-blue eyes, and then he was gone, lost under the stinking sticky blackness.

I heard another elephant’s trumpeting wail. I looked up and saw two of them stampeding towards the lonely spectre of the oil rig. There was a crash as their tusks struck its steel pylons sending shudders through the structure. The elephant’s’ tusks tore at the concrete feet into which the metal legs of the rig were set. There was a terrific cracking sound, as the concrete fractured, releasing its metal burden. The rig began to topple. The legs bent as though they were made of molten metal. There was an agonising metallic scream as they gave way under the weight of the rig. Then it fell, end over end, all 40 tonnes of it, crashing over the cliff’s edge, down into the quarry.

It hit the tar pool with a giant splash, sending waves of tar rippling against the walls of the quarry. I was caught by a wave and thrown towards the elephants and the bottom of the quarry. A bitter taste of tar filled my mouth. I blacked out.

I came to. I opened my eyes and watched as the horizon dipped and fell rhythmically like I was on a boat at sea. The waves rising and falling. It soothed me and my eyes soon felt heavy again.

I woke up some time later. My legs and arms were heavy, hardened with dried tar. My fingers were brittle; my nails were black. The taste in my mouth was rotten and caustic. I was lying on a rug made of dank coarse brown knotted hair. It smelled of mould. I rubbed at my eyes, the tar flaked from my face and I could see through the mask of tar and with a start I found myself straddled over the back of one of the elephants.

In a panic I pulled myself upright. My heart was hurting in my chest; I quelled an involuntary scream. I was riding with a herd. There were 12 elephants in all. I was covered in tar, which had hardened and caked to my clothes and skin. I was like a tar baby compared to the majestic size of the elephants. It was too far to jump down – I would break my leg or be trampled under their feet. I was trapped. I had no choice but to hang on and wait for a chance to escape.

The herd came to a water hole and the one I was on kneeled down. Scooping great amounts of water up with its trunk, it twisted its trunk up and sprayed me with water. The first burst caught me by surprise; it was so strong I nearly slid off the elephant’s back. With the next burst I opened my mouth catching some of the water, quenching my thirst. The water softened the tar and I was able to peel and scrape it from my skin. The tar was the oil company’s grim toxic legacy; a real reminder of the damage done to the desert, home to these elephants. The tar had also taken Walt, but spared me. I wondered why the elephant had helped cleanse the tar from me.

My back was warmed by the hot sun climbing behind us as we set off across the desert dunes. Soon though the sun was too hot to continue and the elephants laboured under the heat. The little one with us was stumbling. We took shelter in the shade of a steep dune, topped by a lone boab tree. In the far distance I thought I saw a camel, its long legs and hump silhouetted on a dune in the sun.

As the evening came I decided to escape. Carefully I inched my body away from the curve of the elephant’s back and crawled to the edge of the dune. Looking back I saw that none of the elephants had stirred and I started walking away. Under the light of the moon the desert looked like a moonscape.

I was exhausted, hungry, and thirsty. Looking at my watch I could see that I had been walking for over an hour, which turned to two and then three. The desert was cold, and my thin singlet did little to keep me warm. I believed I had been walking in a straight line, but then I came to another dune with the same boab on its brow. I stopped short. I began to panic. In front of me were my tracks which I had made over an hour ago. I was walking in circles. I was going to die out here in the desert.

‘Help!’ I shouted. ‘Someone help me!’

Then I heard the trumpet of an elephant’s call, and another echoing back in the far distance. Peering into the darkness I suddenly saw an elephant cresting a dune, followed by another, as they bounded towards me. Fearing I’d be crushed, I fell to the ground, prostrate, crying. Looking up I was surrounded. A trunk reached out and clasped me around the waist. Instead of crushing me, it hefted me into the air and placed me onto its back and then it trumpeted loudly. ‘I’ve found him!’ It seemed to say. That would be the last time I tried to escape from the herd. Better to exist as their prisoner than die of thirst and hunger alone in the desert.

The next day the herd arrived at an oasis. A water hole glistened in the sun, its water a deep emerald green. It looked so different from the water holes near the drilling station. Around it were banana palms and tea trees. The elephant reached out with its trunk and tore off a bunch of fruit, like bananas only they were smaller and their skin was a reddish brown. I watched as the elephants gorged themselves on this fruit. Clambering into the depths of the water hole, they bathed themselves, splashing water on their haunches and spraying each other with the water, trumpeting with glee. The elephant I was on lowered itself to the ground and I slid from its back. I nestled under the shade of a tea tree and picked at the fruit tenderly. I was starving but unsure if the fruit was safe, I ate only a small portion and watched the elephants in the pool and waited. I was too afraid of being crushed under foot to join them.

I had an uneasy sleep that night under the bows of a cluster of boab trees. I experienced a recurring dream about my old friend Walt. We would wake together in my old miner’s hut. Opening the door to greet the new day we would find that the tar pit had crept up at night and surrounded the hut. There was no escape, everything the tar touched was sucked under and never seen again. At last in desperation Walt would try to leap across to the hut opposite mine, but the gap was too wide and he would fall and quickly be sucked away from me. No matter what I tried I could not save him. The dream repeated again and again.

I woke in the morning, the sun already high in the sky. I grabbed for the bunch of fruit. I bit into the peel and tore it from the fruit and stuffed myself with it until I felt sick and thirsty. The elephant hefted me up onto its back and we joined the herd already out across the plain.

That evening I noticed a reddish glow on the horizon, glimmering faintly. It worried me. But at the same time it seemed that that was where we were heading. I nodded off as the sun set, lighting up the dunes in a brilliant pink reminding me of the flesh of a watermelon, which I dreamt of as I slept.

The next day we were closer. As the evening came the reddish glow was more constant, humming and unnatural. Every now and then an elephant trumpeted loudly, only its trumpet wail sounded forlorn. The pace had picked up. We were covering more distance and the elephants did not stop to rest until it was well after sun set and the night was lit by unusual star constellations. The half-crescent moon left white shadows behind the slopes of the dunes and intermittent trees.

That night I was woken soon after I lay down to sleep in the sand which was cooling down after the heat of the day. The elephant gripped me around the waist and hefted me up onto its back. The rest of the herd rose up onto its feet and in eerie silence we marched across the plain in darkness.

The glow was distinct now. I thought I could see the white flash of lights. The headlights of vehicles up in the distance. Then the herd gave out a collective trumpeting wail, like a war-time klaxon horn echoing out around the dunes. We crested a steep dune, my elephant laboured as we neared the top. Then we were over, and before us was a sweeping bustling city of lights and neon and streets and sirens and vehicles. The clash of noise deafened me after the tranquillity out among the herd in the desert.

I clung to the elephant as the herd picked up its pace, bounding and hurtling towards the city. Sand gave way to a rough dirt road and then asphalt. The elephants’ heavy feet clod into it, cracking it in places. Cars screeched to a halt in front of us, and another smashed into it from behind. A pile-up ensued, horns blared and I saw a smashed windscreen smeared with red as we passed them by.

The elephant to my left launched up over a car. Its foot came crashing down, denting its roof, the side windows bursting outwards. I heard sirens in the distance, echoing down the street, bouncing off the glass of the skyscrapers above us. The herd carried on.

At the end of the street was a brass statue of a man in regal old-fashioned uniform holding a telescope and sextant at his side. We thundered towards it. Smashing into the statue with the full force of its approach, my elephant’s tusk sheared off midway down. Emitting a blood-curdling scream, the elephant reared up. I nearly fell from its back, before it came back down, smashing the statue with its feet. The statue toppled and cracked headfirst into the sidewalk. The elephant then trumpeted, encouraging the rest of the herd to follow.

We bounded up the marbled steps of the great building before us. Past Roman-inspired columns. We passed under a giant brass plaque written in Latin and tore through the giant double wooden doors.

Behind us I heard more sirens and saw red and blue lights flashing back down the street. They were coming for us. I heard voices shouting through loudspeakers. I saw people being evacuated from the area by men in black outfits and rifles. The herd pressed on.

Past the double wooden doors we entered an atrium, and then we burst into a giant open area. Men and women in grey suits were sitting in green leather seats, gesticulating and shouting at one another. They saw us and froze and then they tried to flee, running from the onslaught of the herd, running to the green-lit exits. The elephants blocked their way. Working as a team, they marched over them, crushing them underfoot, the sound of terror; of bones being crushed made me clench my eyes shut. The elephants continued on until no one was left.

The herd grouped together in the centre of the room, surrounded by the carnage and torn and splintered green leather seats. They dropped to their knees and touched one another with their trunks, their stomachs rumbling as though locked in some sort of subconscious communication.

Suddenly the men in black outfits burst into the room surrounding all the exits. They carried rifles and red laser lights flickered everywhere. I noticed one wavering on my stomach, hovering over my heart, another was directed at my eye, making me squint and raise a hand up to shield my vision. Then I heard a shout come through on a loudspeaker. Terrible white sparks flashed from every corner of the room, and I was deafened by gunfire. The elephant I was on reared up for the final time. I fell to the ground and rolled to the corner of the room. I huddled beside some rubble, trying to shield myself from the carnage. I could not bring myself to watch as the elephants were slaughtered.

Bullets hit the elephants in a maelstrom of noise mixed with the elephants’ siren-like screams. One giant elephant launched itself towards a cluster of the men, one of its tusks catching one in his midriff; another skewering a man through the chest, killing him instantly. The elephant lifted the man high above the ground, his body limp, lifeless, before twisting and hurling the man’s body into another group of men who were on their knees, their rifles trained at the elephant. The group went sprawling, rifles clattering to the ground but behind them another squad entered the room. For a moment neither party moved, they seemed motionless, and then the men opened fire. Roses of red burst on the its side and the elephant was felled.

I watched in slow motion as one by one the other elephants fell to their knees and keeled over onto their sides under the force of the men’s bullets. The smell of cordite reached me even where I lay under cover. A cloud of dust covered the floor, obscuring the elephants’ legs like a cloth veneer. Smoke billowed up towards the ceiling of the room, the red laser lights hovered over it like some obscene circus lighting show.

There was no escape, all the exits were barred, the elephants surrounded on all sides. I felt that that was all part of what they expected, as though this was their end as they had already deemed it. They died bravely, proud in the accomplishment of their statement. It was as though their trumpeting cries would reverberate further than just these hollowed carved-out walls. I understood the protester’s statement at that moment - I was being called to witness. The elephants’ cries would reach beyond the walls that now confined them to their death. Through me, people will learn of what had happened this day, and their strange and heroic actions will be remembered for long afterwards. I was witness to the day the herd came to town.

Picture by Rick Amor.

A Life of Its Own

2006-07-27T22:37:00.000+10:00

At a little past eleven the wooden African Sculpture took on a life of its own. Freed from its bonds of inanimation. Its legs creaked and became supple. Its wooden eyes had the power of vision. For the first time since its creation, the world had opened up and accepted it as part of the ritual of life. And so with coloured beads and elongated neck, the wooden African sculpture flagged down the first bus to the city and took off in search of an existence.

Night-flies with Franqie Smithson

2006-04-05T10:55:00.000+10:00

Occasionally one needs to transcend that which surrounds him and take on new roles. Like that of an intergalactic-pianist with variant hints of a worldly flavour. Oh yes, I would be well received by the Martian State Conservation of the Correct Proprieties Society. Choruses of crowds and standing ovations on a nightly basis indeed! Until I lost my left pinkie (playing night-flies with Franqie Smithson).

Extract from Shock Fiction Tales: Odes to Death, Decay, Eternal Conflict and the Exaltation of the Quest for the Dream, American or Otherwise by Charles Lidgard © 2004

The Gentleman On The Luxury Liner

2006-03-28T17:10:00.000+11:00

The gentleman on the luxury liner held the new-age stargazer crowd in rapture as he explained his methods of life-and-fare-evasion. A three-pronged metal fork precisely inserted into a rewired wall socket. They discovered a crispy-fried version of their host the next morning in his cabin. No one much commented – except on the new state of the menu (it had taken a dramatic turn for the better in the weeks following the host’s demise).

Extract from Shock Fiction Tales: Odes to Death, Decay, Eternal Conflict and the Exaltation of the Quest for the Dream, American or Otherwise by Charles Lidgard © 2004

The Reality-Stricken Dentist

2006-03-07T10:52:00.000+11:00

The reality-stricken dentist hitched to the next state over aboard an eighteen-wheeler. The driver’s name was Dave and he had a tattoo of a B-52 Bomber Broad on this right shoulder. Occasionally he would proffer a miniature decanter of supreme whisky to ‘help keep the internal fire burning.’ They arrived in the next state over a day later. The dentist had inadvertently left a patient strapped to the theatre bed behind. The patient awoke amidst much toothy pain and groggy from the anesthetic, to find the dentist’s operating rooms abandoned.

Extract from Shock Fiction Tales: Odes to Death, Decay, Eternal Conflict and the Exaltation of the Quest for the Dream, American or Otherwise by Charles Lidgard © 2004

The Woolly Asbestos

2006-03-03T11:45:00.000+11:00

The woolly asbestos gave off a warm glow that solidified in Frank’s lungs. He later went bald.

Extract from Shock Fiction Tales: Odes to Death, Decay, Eternal Conflict and the Exaltation of the Quest for the Dream, American or Otherwise by Charles Lidgard © 2004

The Skeleton-Hot-Rod-Man

2006-03-01T15:28:00.000+11:00

The skeleton-hot-rod-man was at once majesty and mystery. His face was fleshless and toothsome but his car was loud. A cacophony of golden tubing, rivets and steel. He drove me back in time to see a drive-in movie once and bought me a giant tub of creamy popcorn. I spilt some on the dash but he didn’t seem to mind. When he dropped me home along the blackened sea I had to regurgitate the kernels to correct the time-continuum we had crossed only hours before.

Extract from Shock Fiction Tales: Odes to Death, Decay, Eternal Conflict and the Exaltation of the Quest for the Dream, American or Otherwise by Charles Lidgard © 2004

The Anti-Flight Bird

2006-02-27T13:29:00.000+11:00

Once at the Niagara Falls I per chanced upon a silver-swan-schooner. A rare species of anti-flight bird. It swam through the mist of water above the tumultuous surface and ascended the cascading flood with mirror like tranquility before lounging at the falls’ brink, cleaning its feathers with its beak.

Extract from Shock Fiction Tales: Odes to Death, Decay, Eternal Conflict and the Exaltation of the Quest for the Dream, American or Otherwise by Charles Lidgard © 2004

The Robot Mansion

2006-01-30T15:30:00.000+11:00

I meandered across a ranting bum up an aforesaid mentioned street and stopped to spread some word. I gathered he was learned and proffered anti-biotic survival pills. I consumed and sat and took notes. I later collected a dictaphone to facilitate more accurate research and during this experience I grew a beard. At the end of the soapbox discussion I was ready, renewed with vigour is as he described it. The next day I quit my job and cleaned out the robot mansion.

Extract from Shock Fiction Tales: Odes to Death, Decay, Eternal Conflict and the Exaltation of the Quest for the Dream, American or Otherwise by Charles Lidgard © 2004

A Ritualistic Act

2006-01-27T11:05:00.000+11:00

A light bulb exploded above my head while I was sleeping last night. I later determined it was a magical-noble Japanese and had merely performed a ritualistic act of hari-kari. I reluctantly replaced it with a Philips.

Extract from Shock Fiction Tales: Odes to Death, Decay, Eternal Conflict and the Exaltation of the Quest for the Dream, American or Otherwise by Charles Lidgard © 2004

Travelling to the Cartoon Diner

2006-01-25T11:29:00.000+11:00

Travelling to the cartoon diner, Freddie was concerned that he was two-dimensional. The twin-reality-folded figures of Wilbur and Freckles may find his appearance humorous and take vent to laugh at his flattened-frightened form. He was a pencil sketch after all, fleshed out with clever contour shading and a splash of pastel to highlight his good-sides. And he was right.

Extract from Shock Fiction Tales: Odes to Death, Decay, Eternal Conflict and the Exaltation of the Quest for the Dream, American or Otherwise by Charles Lidgard © 2004

The Art of the Pretense

2006-01-23T15:15:00.000+11:00

“YOU LOOK NICE by the way.”
“Why thank you.” I’m feeling my face flush uncontrollably with pride of knowledge and the compliment from such a beautiful woman. A woman I have been thinking about more often lately than any single thing I’ve ever thought about in my entire life. I smile in the knowledge that what she speaks is true and more so because I’m feeling she speaks it because she also thinks that it is true.
Despite my musings on my life the other night in Kensington I seem to still be carrying baggage from a previous life – in fact it may even be my current life. Maybe I’m hoping Leilani can change all of that. Wipe the slate clean. Lead me back to the path before it forked and walk with me down the other track so long forgotten in my past. Lofty thoughts for an evening of delicate surrender indeed.
“And may I say you look every bit as beautiful as when I first saw you in that club…the…”
“At the Lounge. And you can cool it on the flattery. You and I both know that flattery will get you nowhere.” Leilani’s manner is sharp and almost biting and yet she seems to enjoy playing in her power, teasing it out in small measures to see where the lines are drawn. Gauging to see where a connection may be.
“Ah but Leilani I’ve heard otherwise. I’ve heard that flattery will get you everywhere.” I’m putting on my most charming smile, letting her see that there is more within these eyes than what she may merely believe. For no one knows me like me. And the same goes for her. Everyone has a mystery they’re hiding from everyone else. Some even have a mystery they hide from their own selves. Lately its seeming more and more like I am one of those people. Adding in filler to fill in the blanks. Acting more often than being real.
“Have you decided what you’re eating yet?” Leilani’s catching my gaze as I bring myself back down to earth. Too many reverie’s lately, too many thoughts and deeper processes bubbling away just beneath the surface.
“I’m wondering why all these kinds of restaurants insist on these types of menus – the latest in modern cuisine-art. London SoHo culture meets a taste of the orient culminating in a taste sensation that is distinctly L.A. – capital L, capital A. Why?”
“The art of the pretence. In a way I like to see it as reflecting the art of the liaison, the rendezvous. Your food preference and choice of locale are all part of the grand ruse designed to reflect your level of wealth, intellect and taste. It all happens unconsciously – no one is aware of it and yet if you don’t stand up and take notice, you find yourself ensnared. For example, if I, the fine young lady that I am, didn’t have my wits about me, I would gauge you to be a mid-thirties, enterprising gentleman. Successful – hence the lack of fear and monetary concern in taking a lady to a dining establishment such as this,” Leilani spreads her hands out wide taking in a panoramic display of the restaurant section around us. “I would discern you also have very fine taste – for there are many wealthy men out there but only a few care to spend their money so carefully on such matters of fine quality.”
“And the intellectual element?” I’m half-smiling at this discourse. Someone trying to peg my character through the sheer essence of any one thing, particularly my choice in a restaurant, always concerns me.
“The intellectual element in this restaurant is reflected in the menu. A lot of the menu is a multi-lingual smorgasbord. One needs a brain to make the right choice of meal. Also the volume of the restaurant is comparatively quiet thus enabling keener, more private, discussions to take place. I’m also estimating that you chose this as the make-or-break kind of date – spare no expense, choose intimate surroundings – if we’re going to connect then you may as well find out sooner rather than later – and god knows how many men romance their women in all manner of ways and yet never get to spend an intimate quiet moment in conversation together until it is really too late in the proceedings to see if they click.”
“I’m impressed. You’ve put a lot of thought into this little didactic bit.”
“No. Not really. I just like to observe – up close or from a distance it doesn’t matter. But just to observe. Work people out. I’m fascinated by it. But back to the subject, before we move off and onto other less pretentious points. Am I right? This is the big date. Designed to show me the real Richard Caan. Behind the façade – behind the concrete and steel big-city corporate mentality – look there’s a trace of humanity there after all and given enough money maybe you can grow to love it too. Just like you do. Am I right Richard?”
I’m feeling like a fish out of water. Although not what I was quite expecting, I’m enjoying myself. The challenge. The chase. Justify myself to you. Okay then.
“You’re dead right Leilani. In fact you’re in the wrong line of work. Why, with analytical skills like those you could have been Australia’s premier psychologist. Well done. The glove has been slapped squarely across my cheek.”
I’m thinking Leilani sees a hurt expression lurking around the corner of my eyes. She reels back, slightly worried the hurt may still be lingering. She softens her tone and looks me square in the eye and says: “Oh I am sorry Richard. Sometimes I blurt things out that are supposed to be funny or clever but are usually just downright mean or fucking cynical. I’m sorry. I’m a bitch.” She balls up her wine-red napkin nervously and rolls it back and forth.
“Please Leilani - no offence taken. Just as none was intended. In all honesty I’d shut off from a lot of that. Escape-pod mechanism. Beautiful woman insulting me – shut down all sensory equipment.” I’m smiling despite myself. She hurls the screwed up ball at me.
“Enough of those jokes Richard. I’m not sure if anyone has told you this before but…” She leans in and is beckoning me to follow suit, which I do.
“Yes?”
“You’re not funny.” She smiles daggers and then laughter. I feign a hurt in my heart and laugh inconsequentially.
“Now that is plain cheesy.” She’s saying now stretching back in the chair. She looks around then back at me. “We haven’t ordered yet have we?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“Then let’s get out of here. I hate this place – don’t get me wrong-” She holds up her hands in defense, “I like this place – I really do. Very… very thoughtful but I think you probably bring all your yet-to-be-conquests here and I’m determined to break some moulds here if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind at all.” And I’m telling the truth. I’ve been bringing girls here for longer than I can remember. Each dancing delicately around the rim before effortlessly falling into my car and then home. Just another part of the cliché that is my life. The life of Richard.
I place a tip onto the table out of courtesy and after checking out our coats we head out the great glass swinging doors and out into the balmy summery evening.

* * * * *

“Lately I feel that I’m living a slow death. It’s hard to explain but my entire life feels like this giant trap that is slowly swallowing me up. And I’m doing all I can to dig myself out and change it all around but a lot of the time I find I don’t have the strength to change. Or the will power. And a lot of other times I feel I don’t know what it is that needs to change if any of it were possible anyway. Shit. It’s hard to explain and I’m probably boring you but can you understand anything about what I’m saying. Shit I’m drunk and I’m sorry.”
“Ah alcohol - the perpetual truth serum. Imbibing of the drink of the gods will get you that my dear friend.” Leilani slumps down against one of the wooden columns supporting the pier. “And don’t be.”
“Don’t be what?”
“Sorry. I know what you’re saying. I understand it.” She’s smiling at me and I get lost in the smile for a moment and an eternity.
We’d ended up eating greasy kebabs from a vendor on the wharf front just down from the Channel Seven building. I picked up a six-pack of Crown lagers – Leilani’s preference, not mine, and now we were ensconced on the edge of the pier at the very far end where it breaks away into metal fence work and ‘keep out’ signs. Away from the sound of the lonely tram that’s making its meandering way back into the city along its Collins Street route. Away from the neon buzz of the Channel Seven sign, fifteen feet high and flecked with all the red and yellow colors you can bear. And away from the buzz of people, the rollerbladers, the yachting enthusiasts out for an evening stroll with their wives and their poodles with yellowing fur on their feet and around their mouths, and away from all the others.
“It’s quiet here.” Leilani muses.
“It is. I’ve been coming here a lot lately. I walk down here from my place in North Melbourne. There’s a track that leads all the way down to the docklands and eventually to the wharf. This is my favorite spot though. I just sit and watch the boats come in and out, mooring up and casting off, the people coming and going. I like to watch the traffic over on the West Gate Bridge merging and clanging and grinding gears. I imagine all the noise and fury of the rat race up there and rejoice that I am as close to it and yet as far away from it as one can get here. And for a few minutes I feel as though I have escaped.”
“Escaped? What do you mean? What do you need to escape from Richard? You’ve got it all – as we were saying earlier – anyone looking down at your life from somewhere above would believe that you’ve got it all – the great job, the great house-”
“You haven’t seen my house yet.”
“Oh right – yeah – sorry. And am I to presume it’s not all that I’m expecting? A dilapidated squat in Footscray perhaps? Oh no – it can’t possibly be because you live in North Melbourne, you work for GQ, you drive a Saab convertible. Come on Richard – we both know you’re a walking advertisement for all of life’s modern conveniences. You said so yourself that night at The Lounge.”
“Exactly. You’re not listening Leilani. That’s what my life has become. Fuck I don’t even know why I’m telling you this – I’m supposed to be trying to get you into bed – but that’s just what I’m feeling. I feel that its all bullshit. It’s not making me happy anymore. I don’t even know if it ever did. It all a big fucking lie. And fuck please tell me why am I telling you all this again?”
“Because you think that just maybe I’m that one special person who might be able to understand you completely. 100%. No questions asked. Accept who you are and know it and then break it all down.”
“And?”
“I can’t Richard! That’s what you still don’t understand. I can get to know you and I mean we’re drunk so I’ll admit that I even like you already but no one can change who you are except yourself. You need to do that for you. Do yourself a favor. Do the world a favor. Shit I don’t know. What do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know. I’m just ranting and it feels good to be able to share all this with someone else. You don’t know how many times I’ve sat right here, in this very spot, thinking these things, realizing these truths, and despite all of that, just wishing that I could share them with someone else. And fuck I’ve got to say that right now, talking like we are now, I feel fucking great and thank you for just being here with me, just at this particular moment for whatever it is worth.”
I turn to her and she stares into my eyes and for once I feel like there was no wall there between me and someone else. For once I feel naked, exposed. She reaches her hand up and wipes away a tear that was streaking its way down my face and she replaces it with a kiss. She then reaches up and kisses me, gentle and caring up on the lips, the merest of whispers which I barely feel yet it sends fires of heat and warmth into my chest and heart and I feel good. I feel good and whole. I smile back at her and pull her into my arms and we lean back against the post behind me and watch one of the ships come into the harbor. Its lights blazing out of the portholes and on the aft and stern pilot lights flicker intermittently, casting unusual green and reddish reflections on the water around it. The water bubbles and churns in its wake and we watch as tiny waves begin to break against the pier below us. I lean my head against Leilani’s and close my eyes, lost in the reverie of magic and beauty of the moment.

[extract from the novella The Subversion of Richard by Charles Lidgard, published 2002 by Trouser Books -e-book: http://pulpbits.com under General Fiction]

Image sourced from: http://www.artline.com/galleries/haslem/treisman/1985/DinnerDate093DIN1.jpg

Strange Adventures

2006-01-20T10:03:00.000+11:00

Treasure Island, Moby Dick, Robinson Crusoe – some fairly hard-hitting literature to be sure from a more golden age than this one … but the idea that the knowledge therein contained could provide a means through which to conquer the world?

The ape would be better off putting that lofty imagination to use as a writer itself…

(For more hilarities like this see: http://www.superdickery.com/galleries.html)

The Merrells

2004-12-11T14:12:00.000+11:00

It spun on its x and y axis, upside down, the right way up, through 360 degrees of motion, all with the briefest of movements from my mouse. I stared on with rabid glee. This was the shoe that accurately reflected who I was. I with the capital I. The self personified. Royal Elastics, THE company that had pioneered the shoe without the lace, and although I had fond memories of my first pair of Velcro (and therefore shoelace-less?) sneakers at the age of 7, this was a company mantra I could endorse. Let’s rebel against the norm - the shoe lace majority could run in terror. Out damn shoelaces, out! Firstly though a purchase of this importance needed endorsement from a set of key regulars. So I asked my fashion friend, she of the Diesel shoes, Helen. Upside down, the right way up, the flash program did its thing. ‘Very nice’, she concurred. ‘Are you going to buy them?’

‘It is a possibility,’ I confirmed. ‘It can’t be discounted,’ I intimated.

‘I don’t like them.’ Bean said when I showed her the shoe company’s website, and the shoe in question.

‘What’s wrong with them?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know - I just don’t like them…But then I don’t like anything that looks like a sneaker. I prefer boots. Black leather boots. Why don’t you get a pair of black leather boots?’

The thing was becoming an obsession, but then what wouldn’t when there was nothing else to occupy your mind. My mind that is, not Bean’s - she had her black leather boots remember?

So I returned to DC Shoes in the city. On the movie theatre street. Near Village Cinemas. I needed a new pair of shoes – my last pair had been a false economy – a pair of $30 sneakers from Payless Shoes. A veritable bargain at the time – so cheap the agonising choice of design and shade was removed – they came in one colour, black. But just as the agonising choice had been removed, so too had that satisfying feeling that accompanies a perfect purchase – that consumer euphoria received at the hands of a retail outlet when such a good choice is made - because they did not last, and I knew they wouldn’t the moment I stepped out of the store with them. Made wholly of vinyl they now sit at the bottom of my closet, collecting dust. Not nice enough for an evening out, not comfortable enough for anonymous walks around my suburb. The vinyl veneer cracked and peeled away within weeks, and the shoe seemed to be a magnet for smell, not of the pleasant variety, and not only of feet - it left me confused and, in the dead of night, a little frightened.

The assistant brought out the Royal Elastics shoe in my size and a few other pairs that had caught my eye, but of course the lace less shoe, reflecting my own independence in this world, was to be the obvious choice. I pulled it on and remarked at how tight a fit it seemed, the kind of fit that after time would seem loose, slipping, unreliable.

‘Yeah – they’ll loosen up in time,’ the salesman said.

Once attached to the end of my leg they looked incongruous, clumsy, ill-looking. I danced up to the mirror, feigning a casual expression, raising an eyebrow, and imagined a smoky bar tableau – me, some cute brunette in the corner, the friendly faced bartender you know from black and white Bogart films, serving me whiskey’s and dries. A charming scene to be sure but the reverie was shattered by these great hulking shoes on the ends of my legs that looked, well, weird.

‘They look weird,’ I said and the assistant did nothing to alleviate my concerns. ‘They’ll loosen up in time’ he might have proffered again if pressed. I returned to the modern square box of padding and red cloth that comprised the seat for customers on which to perch and try on shoes, dejected and defeated.

‘I’ll try the Diesels.’ I said. ‘Bring me the Diesels.’

Slipping them on I immediately gained the visage of a modern Italian bohemian, a man of means and charm, with the propensity for offshore accounts and a hotted-up car and too-tight jeans. In the shop mirror, their profile curved up at the end with a zesty charisma, looking straight down on them they resembled the cheekiness of a Nordic elf or perhaps a Cornish pixie. A contradiction, a myriad of personalities and all in this one shoe. But the contradiction continued, here was a shoe at the top end of the price spectrum – some $240 (and even then they were already heavily reduced) and yet for all that money, poorly applied shoe glue was apparent all around the sole and the leather upper. A strap designed to be an eyelet for part of the laces was made from thin see-through plastic – with the mere act of doing up my laces each day I would be jeopardising the longevity of this shoe.

While strutting up and down and around, making exaggerated walking gestures with my legs and feet like the clown I was, I spied the shoe I would choose – Merrell’s – the High Performance shoe. As I was asking the assistant to look them out in my size the manager of the store emerged from the back room: ‘I own three pairs of those shoes – best investment I ever made – you’ll never look back.’ This, a ringing endorsement from the manager of the store who could literally pick and choose from any of the shoes here and the Merrell’s were $80 cheaper. Instantly comfortable yet athletic, sprightly yet solid, I was sold when I slid them on. They fitted like injected rubber, like solidified jelly running between my toes, heel and sole. But still I resisted – I tried on the Merrells, then the Diesels, then the Merrells. Then another shop assistant appeared and contrary to popular shop assistant conduct, he pointed me in the direction of the cheaper, longer lasting shoe.

‘These here are Diesels.’ He hiked up the leg of his designer jeans, stress-worn and pre-tattered, to reveal a pair of stressed-leather brown boots with unusual modern toes and miniature tears and rips all along the in-step. They had seen some heavy use – some heavy walking – like scaling the Matterhorn single-handed and without the aid of oxygen heavy. ‘I’ve had them for three months.’ He said. ‘I only wear them in the store.’ He said.

I left with the Merrells.

The Death of Me

2004-09-07T16:44:00.000+10:00

‘Will that be all?’ She asked. Her eyes stealing a glance at the book open in front of me.
‘Oh, and a flat white would be great, thanks.’
‘You’re welcome.’ She gave me a wide smile before dancing back into the steam and heat of the kitchen. I just sat and stared after her. It’s funny sometimes, you can spend most of your twenties enjoying the quiet solitude life can offer for those who want to find it. Find a balance between connections, friendships, lovers, while all the while avoid getting caught up too deeply, ensnared in other people’s lives and business. Move along at the surface level of everything. I was the type who generally stayed around the periphery, looking in; watching, learning. I liked to think I made things happen that needed to happen, stopped things that shouldn’t be happening, and on top of all that, I liked to think I was exclusively a master of my own destiny. I smiled at the thought, and went back to my book.
This girl though, she was different. Not in any way that I could put my finger on, but just different. The way she looked at me and smiled, the way she walked, the way she had her hair; the way I’d been going back to this café now for three weeks in a row, and would come again next week; that kind of different. Special. And somehow I knew that this girl would be the death of me.

Image sourced from: http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/activity/g/glb-coffee/cup.jpg

The Mists of Chaos

2004-09-02T11:55:00.000+10:00

The thing that made it so difficult for him, was that it was the same job, day in day out. A recurring sample, a reel flicking over and over again. Continuous loop. Cycling. The same reality swirling around his neck like buzzards on a hook.
The walls dripped with a blood-red glistening ooze. Its malevolent beginnings cast a reminder of horrible deeds gone bad in its seeping spread as it reached the edge of the carpet.

Image sourced from: http://www.wright.edu/wrightway/workstation.gif

The Last Time

2004-09-01T12:05:00.000+10:00

The last time I saw Rachel seemed enshrouded in the mist I now realised had been encapsulating me at the time. The images were hazy, incomplete; the emotional connection felt hollowed out, empty of any true weight. I remember I had been in the grippe of a malaise that had essentially threatened my spiritual health since I had left school all those many years prior. I was lying naked and fearful upon my wrinkled and worn bed linen, writhing and fighting with my consciousness for an answer to it all, this life that we all must lead on our own. The doorbell had chimed once, fitful and furtive, echoing down my hallway and greeting me with a baleful jabbing of knowledge that it must be answered. I groaned and found myself gripping my pillow against my chest, hugging so tightly as though were I to let go I would set adrift from the security of my deep maroon-upholstered and lacquered IKEA-inspired surroundings. I prayed that the caller would go, prayed to all and sundry that would listen… ‘please god, please let this person go now and leave me’, ‘please god, let the person at my door realise they are wanted elsewhere’, ‘let them realise that they know not what they do, but that they must go and leave me be, thus it is done by the power of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost’; make them presume no one was home, perhaps call back at another time; but they did not. The doorbell chimed again, longer this time – an incessant calling of attention, someone is here, you must answer the door, society bids this convention be followed. A deep moan and then I’m languidly rolling to the edge of my bed and then dropping, flummoxed to the floor, the brittle cold of the bare polished floorboards clanging against my bones with a dull, thudding pain that took time to subside. Pulling my bathrobe around my nakedness, I lurch up towards the door to greet a ghost from my memory.

The Art of Work

2004-08-31T10:15:00.000+10:00

There is a special art to getting someone off the phone in as quick a time possible. I was nearing perfection. If a call came through that I could answer but if it would take too much of my time then I’d forward it on to someone else claiming ignorance. Otherwise I’d answer lightning-fast and unusually unhelpfully.
That was what was happening lately.
Time was ticking too quickly. Passing me by while I sat in an ergonomically-friendly desk chair with a frowning posture and miserable rounded shoulders. I was slowly dying and no one seemed to realize, let alone care.
And why should they? I mean I didn’t. Or did I?
I found my true train of thoughts constantly interrupted by meaningless phone calls. Half-witted folks droning at the end of a phone line. An old woman who has lost her husband is seeking help with the medical insurance claim. She is out of pocket to the tune of thousands. I am the one who picked up the phone.
I am the one who transfers it to someone who is paid to care.
I am paid.
But do not care.
This thought breaks when I receive a notification I have new mail. The office funny guy sending another chain-email. I would like to break him. Emotionally. Intellectually. Physically. Break him and leave him lying in a cooling pool of blood. Cloying around his ankles.
This boiling thought is broken by a phone ringing at an unoccupied desk where someone has left their mobile on and unattended.
I am tempted to break it.
Yeah so the thin veneer is crumbling down. Collapsing. It took two years. A lot of man hours. A solid regimen of 9-5. Monday to Friday. Two Towers fell. Wars raged and are raging. People fought, lost their lives, people were killed, murdered, planes exploded, trains collided, countries flooded, volcanoes erupted.
Disasters.
While I hacked away at my keyboard.
Bent over a monitor.
Sitting in meetings.
Traveling to work.
But what none of any of it has answered is where does all this go. To battle away at work until I’m comfortably numb enough to accept it? Where I can accept work and this ongoing battle with insanity as merely a means to an end? Where’s the bold dashing anti-hero – who takes me under my wing, shows me the error of my ways. Opens my eyes. Movies don’t do it anymore. I have an opinion but nobody is listening. I’m not listening to anyone else either. No one’s life plan will work for me just as mine won’t work for anyone else. Only I’m someone who accepts that. I won’t ram it down your throat – you must lead life as I do. I’m no shining example of morality. I make a choice not to sleep with someone. It’s not some moral high ground I’m taking here. Maybe it’s a superiority complex. They’re too ugly and cheap for me. They’re not worth the time and effort especially considering it takes a lot to make me feel these days. I don’t fit all the molds. I’m in this world but not of it.
The clichés are no longer fitting. Everyone else feels this way and that only makes the isolation all the worse.
You feel shit. So does everyone else.
But you don’t care. I’m afraid to admit it but neither does anyone else.
Am I being brave expressing this? No. Bravery in the new age is over, a fantasy garnered by big-selling movie executives. They dish out and sell bravery, and romance, and honor, and intrigue as they see it. They own the rights. You can only buy into it.

[extract from the novella The Subversion of Richard by Charles Lidgard, published 2002 by Trouser Books]

Number 57 West Maribyrnong Tram Home

2004-08-27T14:43:00.000+10:00

The tram shuddered to a jerking halt on the corner of Victoria and Elizabeth Street. Its heaving hulk strained at the brakes which grunted and seethed at the effort. The doors swung clumsily open on their creaking decrepit hinges and those passengers who were standing were flung back momentarily as they gripped the plastic hand-grips more tightly against the motion.
A group of three males in their mid-twenties swung aboard with all the swagger and bravado afforded to those who move in belligerent groups of drunken powerhouses. They quickly moved to the back of the tram where they welled around the steps at the rear, safe from too many prying eyes.
I looked up from my book and studied them for a moment. One, who was shorter than the others, and with a heavier sturdy build, had three gashes across his face which were glistening with blood, still wet, from what was obviously a recent wound. As I sensed he was about to see me watching him I turned back to my book, alternating between reading and peering out into the damp wet Melbourne night. It was winter and people were scurrying between the shelter of shop awnings and the open unprotected streets. I watched a business man in a grey suit pull the collar of his coat up around his neck to keep out the chilling rain. I huddled back against the warm cloth of my seat and felt warmed by the heat coming up beneath me, generated by the trams internal heating system and listened to the short and sturdy man speak to his friends.
“Fucking bloody junkies, mate. Fucking junkies. Never trust a fucking junkie.” He was emboldened in his inebriated state, swaying with the tram’s motion as the door’s slid shut once more and with a ding of the tram’s warning bell, it shuffled off and turned the corner onto Victoria Street. He was speaking loudly as though to make his point known to all those aboard. Those sitting closest to him were predominantly Asians, families and students, trundling their way home after a trip to the Markets with black wire-framed shopping trolleys laden with all manner of vegetables and produce for the week ahead. The mid-twenties sturdy white male with the bleeding cuts and bravado then knelt down next to one such unwitting passenger – a petite Asian girl, who clutched her bag of University books and plastic bag of groceries closer to her chest for protection as he lent in – and began a didactic dribble:
“Never trust fucking junkies. D’ya hear me? Never. Fucking fuckers will fucking nearer rip your face off than talk to ya. She fucking spat on me when ah went up to grab me’self a fucking beer! Spat on me – all down my jacket and all ‘cos I bumped into her with me shoulder on the way past. Totally fucking fucked. Ah. Fuck. Bullshit. Fucking bullshit!” He looked back up at his two friends. They nodded in agreement. One spoke back, while the other settled himself further down in the back steps adjoining the exit doors not in use on this journey.
“Fucking ‘a mate. Fucking ‘a. Bullshit is right.”
“I mean fuck! Look at me face! Bleeding an’ shit all over the friggin’ place. My face is fucked up man.” He suddenly caught my gaze and I quickly averted my eyes. The last thing I needed was to be accosted by a drunk violent blow-hard Aussie yobbo. I looked out of the window once more and a smile broke upon my face as I thought about the irony of the situation.

Image sourced from: http://www.beluba.com.au/ww3/fotos/m_tram.jpg

The Super

2004-08-26T09:31:00.000+10:00

As Richard closed his door he saw a light on in the apartment opposite and as he hovered in the doorway, head craning out a jut, a curtain twitched and then hung slack and then nothing. The light went off a second later. The apartment had been empty for as long as he had lived there.

The Super answered the door on the second knock, dressed in a singlet and wiping food from the corners of his mouth with a dirty-looking tea-towel.
“What is it?” He said.
“My place, 36G’s been vandalised again – someone’s spray painted all over the grill and window into the hall.”
“I’ll attend to it as soon as I can. Probably be the day after tomorrow, depending.”
Richard nodded his thanks, but remained in the doorway. The Super frowned and shook his head. “Is there something else?”
“Has someone moved into the place opposite me?”
“Up on 36? I’ll check the books. Excuse me.” He pushed the door closed again, it stuck in the frame before it thudded closed. It reopened with the security chain on. The Super trundled away into the mirk and Richard could see a small TV playing some game show over in the corner and behind that velvet-red curtains with long dark stains in the folds. And Rosie for 10 points… who am I? I was born in 1938, the son of a famous industrialist… On the arm of a threaded couch lay some glossy girlie magazine. A smell of refried beans and canola oil blew out into the cold corridor. “Yeah, someone’s moved in, under the name Ruanna. Moved in yesterday. Her application was accepted a week prior. Problem?”
Richard refocused from the TV to the Super. “Sorry? No, no problem. I just wondered. I thought I saw a light on in there, that’s all.”
“Yeah? Well that’ll be them then won’t it?”
“Well yeah I guess so.”
“Anything else?”
“No. Thanks. Have a good night.”
“I’ll try.” He said rubbing his neck before the door slammed shut.
Richard headed back off down the hall. Then a thought seized him and he lashed out with his boot against the wall. Fucking wanker. It must be a hard life getting interrupted by actual legitimate fucking work in the middle of jerking off to some mag while a big-titted contestant plays dumb on Sale of the Century. He can go to hell. “Wanker!” He shouted and caught the face of a frightened girl peering out at him through a foggy window, features distorted by the grill before her breath fogged the window further and she vanished a moment later.

Image sourced from: www.everythingnotrelated.com/ 2004_01_01_archives

Fragments from the Abyss

2004-07-30T16:20:00.000+10:00

“Did you bring it?”
“Of course I did. But, hey, how are you? Sorry I didn’t come last Sunday – I had a meal thing with my parents, Dad and the Step-mom.”
“That’s okay. Nothing much more to tell from this week to the last. I’ve been here and still am. Taking the meds on time, socialising – sorry – fraternizing even is perhaps better – taking the right routes when discussing my condition. Things are looking good – it’s getting better all the time,” he hummed off into The Beatles tune.
“But that sounds all positive man. Like there’s a sense of progression – the more that time passes the more progress you make.”
“But, I’m still here. That’s what I’m trying to say. You’re here, right now, but in two hours from now, you’ll be Tony back at home, tomorrow you’ll be Tony at work. Tony down at the pub. Tony at the corner store. Tony, Tony, Tony - at all these different places, at different times, and what am I? Where am I? I’m here, all those times, here and now, and here and now in five minutes from now. And here in five months from now. A voluntary admission whose leaving is not at his disposal.”
I just looked down at my feet. He was right. I knew it, but it hurt me to face his eyes and let him see the pain I felt at his being here, at him being in here. I counted the eyelets on my right shoe and let Ant continue.
“I came in and now I can’t go out. Not for another five months. That’s what they told me yesterday at the monthly meeting update. I sit and allow the doctors to become ‘better acquainted with the acuity of my manic depression’. They ask and I reply. And each reply is marked in scrolls of paper they carry in their little brown suitcases. And they are old, learned, wise men and with that knowledge they can pass judgment and deem that I remain.”
“But Ant, things will be getting better… you’ve already come full-circle since when… Since when you first came in here I mean.”
“Oh Tony, thank you. Without that little tid-bit of knowledge I wouldn’t have known.”
“Fuck off.” I said. The rudeness was it. It didn’t become him. It wasn’t him or at least it seemed to amplify one dark aspect that was him. We all have negative and positive traits, but for some reason on the meds, the negative trait was amplified. I thought it was more like something designed to be a protective mechanism. Designed to keep me seeing the pain, and scared man in front of me. I was scared too. I raised my head and looked him back in the eye.
“I’m sorry. But you know that it pisses me off when you speak like that. I know it’s meant to be in humour, but I don’t find it funny. Not now… in this place.”
“Yeah… sure.. Hey I’m sorry. I was just kidding around. Can I have a cigarette?”
I leaned back on my chair and reached into my jacket pocket.
“Here,” and handed him a cigarette. He inhaled deeply and leaned back in his chair and we looked and grinned at each other, conspiratorially, like the old days.
“Thanks man,” he said, the light of happiness suddenly growing in his bright, glistening eyes.
The door opened up behind him and a warden came into the room. He was holding a clip board in his hand and a pen. He looked up for a second at Ant and I talking and then went back into the office. There was no hurry, we had all the time in the world.
“Next time I come will be the third Sunday in March.”
“Oh, okay – what are you doing again?”
“My girlfriend and I – I’m taking her down skiing around the alps down south. We’ll taking a week at her parents, and then another week on the snow.”
“Sounds nice.”
“It will be. I feel bad telling you, as though I’m lauding it over you. It makes me feel ashamed to be experiencing something like that, and knowing you’ll still in here.”
“Hey, hey. Hey. Look, I know what you mean because we talked about the other time. I know, but I like hearing about your trips man. It reminds me of the life that’s going on out there. I see it on TV even. Like even though it’s pre-recorded it’s still almost a global record of what that actor was doing in that time and place. And if you know the schedule date, then you know that right then that was that actors’ mindset. Those images and scenes had that effect, but more magnified and, possibly convoluted, on that actor and they had a similar effect to what you felt when you saw the movie later on. You share a moment in time. I like hearing your stories but it feels like I’m sharing a moment in time with you, when I know what you’re doing and I can imagine you doing it, as though I was doing it. Is this making any sense?”
“Yeah, no, I know what you’re saying. Continue.” I flourished my hand, and smiled and then took a last drag on my cigarette.
“It also reminds me that those things are things I can be doing when I get out of here. It reminds me of what the world can hold for me when I get out. Even if I don’t do any of them, at least the option would at least be there, y’know?”
“Yeah I know. Anyway, I gotta go. I dig hanging out with you man. I’ll write you a bit more about my trip this week and post it to you when I hit the road. This’ll be over soon man, and I’ll take you up there. Find you a nice lady friend and we’ll all head up. I know you’ll love it up there man. It’s one magical place.”
I scraped my chair back and stood up. I left the packet on the table for Ant later on, and slid my cap on, rolling it low over my eyes. I bent my head a little when I said goodbye, it was the most humblest gesture I could think of at the time. I couldn’t just walk out and get on with my life, knowing what was his life.
“Hey, I’ll definitely send that letter man. And maybe a picture or something.”
“Have an excellent trip my friend. Have the best time and enjoy it. You will for sure. And thanks for coming up to see me. It means a lot man, more than you would know.”
“I know. I know man. It’s all good. I’ll see if I can bring up Jimmy next time as well.”
“Sure. Anyway ah thanks man and, until the next time, ‘you take care now, bye bye.’ He imitated Jim Carrey and we both laughed then shook hands and I walked off into my own little life and got on with it.

Image sourced from: http://www.photosapien.com/gallery/albums/userpics/10179/Whitby33.jpg

Hey, come to

2004-07-30T12:48:00.000+10:00

‘Hey, come to,’ I said. I shook him again, but he did not stir. His head lolled around listlessly, a heavy bulb on a paper string, I grabbed his shoulders and shook him, hard, lifting his head from the floor, my hand beneath it to stop it striking the polished wood. What to do? What to do? I thought, clicking my fingers and looking about absently. Some water maybe. No, need to get him up. Walk him through to his room. Put him down on the bed.
Crouching low below him, I lift up an arm and slide my head and shoulder in under it. Rocking in circles slightly I am able to wedge in and get an angle to clasp his chest and lift him up using my legs at the knees to lift him up. He is just under a foot taller than me and so I am stretching to get him up on his legs, which drag and catch on the furniture as I stagger with him to his room. He is a dead weight and I’m exhausted with the exertion by the time he flops headlong onto the bed. He moans slightly and immediately goes into deep snoring, stilted slightly every fourth or fifth breath, where the air comes through strained.
I place a glass of water on his bedside table later, and then turn off the light and close the door. He will sleep the deepest sleep. And he’ll make the coffee in the morning upon awaking, and we’ll both sit and stand, talking and smoking, combing our hair and showering, and then the both of us will head off to work.

Image sourced from: http://www.museion.it/download/floyer_02.jpg

Calling Home

2004-07-21T13:08:00.000+10:00

The coins drop, clunking into the phone box. There’s silence and then faint clicking sounds as my call is connected, followed by the familiar ringing tone. In my father’s house, some 1200 miles away, all of his three phones are ringing: upstairs and downstairs and out in the double-garage and workshop. I cringe at the thought: I have not spoken to my father in some three years. It’s funny the way parents place all their own abandoned hopes and desolated dreams onto their children, the things that they themselves didn’t attain when at the same age.
Three rings, four. Father will be scrambling in from tending the garden, turning off the sprinklers, putting down his rake, and wiping the dirt from his boots on the rough and tattered mat. Five rings, six. He’ll be methodically washing his hands, rolling them under the faucet of the downstairs washbasin - the smell of Solvol spreading its dim clean cheer. Two hours behind, it must be about midday there now as father dries his hands on the washroom towel. Then smoothing his silvered hair, he will be walking purposefully to the phone. Seven, eight rings. Then a click and a machine whirring, echoing down the line’s scratchy connection. ‘I am sorry but I can’t come to the phone right now. If you leave your name, number and a short message, I will return your call as soon as I can.’
My attention wavers over the Telstra advertisement mounted over the phone set. A new calling card is available: ‘Keep in touch with friends & family with Telstra’s easy-save option. An easy way to keep warm this winter’. Someone has taken a marker pen and added a moustache and goatee to the smiling woman in the photo, who is standing in a phone box, around which is superimposed a large fireplace replete with an antique hearth and grill. Above that someone has spray-painted over Telstra’s logo with the words: ‘Fuck Off and Die’. The last letters ‘i’ and ‘e’ don’t fit on the frame and they have dripped and run over the window of the phone box like rude uninvited guests.
The answering message ends and there is a shrill beep. As I hang up the phone, I can hear a voice down the end, whispering in static through the receiver: ‘Hello? Hello? Is anyone there? Is anyone there? Hello?’ I can’t be sure. I cut it off seconds later by jamming the receiver down on its cradle. I lift it back off again and then jam the phone down again and again, violently, until the thing comes away in my hands. Plastic splinters flying about the little claustrophobic booth. I jam it down repeatedly until just the metal cabling hangs limply from the box: frayed colourful wires, like nerves trying to move a limb that is no longer there; a phantom muscle movement. I kick the booth door open and walk quickly back to my apartment in the projects.

Image sourced from: http://www.clubvw.org.au/images/phone_box.jpg

The T.V. Was Shot

2004-07-20T10:32:00.000+10:00

The TV was shot. The video was fucked. That pissed Gregory off. The illicit porno had flashed up briefly - the screen awash with erotic copulating sweating flesh - then it crackled and blurred at the edges before totally disintegrating into a fuzzy storm of white and black dots. Gregory strained his eyes - for a second he thought he could make out a silhouette of something moving - possibly something of humanoid origin...FUCK!!! He threw his tissues down on the ground and did up his pants. This fucking thing was useless. He remembered back to the bespectacled Chinese man at the electrical shop. "See? Work very well. Good picture - see - very good price. You buy? You buy now?" The Chinese man almost attacked Gregory with his predictable verging-on-gibberish pigeon-English ranting. "VERY VERY GOOD PICTURE! VIDEO CHEAP AND WORK WELL! YOU BUY NOW!" "OKAY!!!" Gregory relented and forked over the $50 for the video and another $70 for the TV. As he was trundling them out he caught sight of a video lying on its side on the top of a shelf. "Asian Butt Bangers". Gregory broke speed limits on his way home.
Gregory stood in front of the snow-balling screen. His balls blue-balling. His lips stretched back in an evil snarl and he contemplated beating his new purchase into a thousand electrical pieces. But something caught his eye. There was movement on the screen again. This time it seemed slightly clearer. He peered closer - his face inches from the screen. That was definitely movement - was that a woman's silicon-enhanced breast? Possibly a giant rubberized dildo? Maybe just someone's leg? He peered closer still...
A snow-balling white-static noise of an arm reached out from the screen and gripped his shoulder. He reared back and instinctively tried to break away from its calculating grasp. But the arm pulled him closer, closer, closer into the TV.
Gregory found himself strapped to a bed covered with plastic sheets. The bed was shimmering and covered with a fuzzy snow-ball effect. He was naked - his own body awash in white noise electrical snow-storms. He peered out into the fuzzy blurry snow-balling room. His sense of perception was shot. His optical sensors couldn't get a grip on his surroundings.
He could make out a silhouette coming closer...It was the bespectacled Chinese man form the electrical shop! He was naked and a fuzzy snow-balling appendage hung low from his groin. "VERY VERY GOOD PICTURE! YOU ARE CHEAP AND WORK WELL! YOU WILL BE IN MOVIE - YES? I MAIN STAR - YOU LOVER! I MAKE LOVE TO YOU NOW YES?" Gregory's lips curled back in a silent scream of excruciating terror...From somewhere he swore he could hear bad 70s disco music with a bad guitar solo playing up a storm.

Image sourced from: http://static.zed.cbc.ca/users/e/EricB/files/tv.gif