The two people above us in 7a were loud. I mean, the guy had a LOUD voice. You could hear him booming through the ceiling, every syllable, every utterance, as he banged on like someone shouting into a bullhorn at a funfair. I mean Wow! Did this guy like to talk! To me, it sounded like he got off on supplying a running commentary on everything, no matter how trivial, a steady flow of words intended to illuminate his every thought. It got so bad that on rare occasions when there was silence, we’d sit there, counting out the seconds before he started up again. 1-2-3-4-5-6…..and off he'd go. Talking, talking, talking. The woman, although she was less talkative, would contribute, filling in the gaps between his diatribes with her squeaky voice. This happened every night and pretty much all weekend.
The old man who used to live up there, in the apartment above us, never made a peep. I mean we literally never heard him. Not sneeze. Not even the occasional scrape of a chair being dragged across the floor. Nothing. So we had no idea about his life. Sure, we ran into him in the corridor from time-to-time and said ‘hello’ but that was about it. He kept to himself. Had a really quiet life. Then he moved out or maybe he died? I'm not too clear on what happened there. Anyway, once he was gone, these two big mouths moved in.
I don’t know what was so damn interesting about their lives that they needed to blather away so much. Some people just like to talk. My brother is a talker. He will go on and on forever. I once said to him, Jed, do you think there is a thing such as too much explaining? He said, what do you mean? And I said, dude, you have some very interesting things to say but what I’m suggesting here is that…maybe all your good ideas are getting lost in the….(I wanted to say 'bullshit' but I didn’t)….explaining. Didn’t a famous philosopher once say, the quite man keeps his tongue while everyone in the room is busy losing theirs? Something like that.
Anyway, my brother Jed looked at me kind of funny when I said this and then he goes, it's called conversation dickhead. And I said, hey sugar tits I’m just telling you this for your own good. I am just trying to educate you here with some advice. Understand?
Oh man, that wasn’t what you'd call a 'pleasant evening'. Not at all. Jed didn't speak to me for a couple of weeks after that because he was having a sulk. Or maybe it was me? I can’t remember all the details.
Anyway, from the very first night they appeared, the people up in 7a would blather on and on. Yap, yap, yap.....And you have to understand, they lived right on top of us so it wasn't just the talking. No. They were LOUD in every other way. We could hear them doing everything: eating their cornflakes, brushing their teeth, walking from room-to-room, slamming doors shut, opening and closing cupboards every two minutes, turning on taps, flushing the toilet, watching the telly, screwing….their sex life alone was.....well, it sounded like a pair of walruses fighting over a fish. And aside from the escalating cries and grunts, there was also the headboard thumping out a steady rhythm against the wall. Thump, thump, thump. To have such an intimate understanding of someone’s sex life was a little disturbing, to say the least. (And I’ll admit it, they made me feel a bit lazy like maybe Izzy and I were slacking off a bit in the old boudoir lov'n department. As a result, I bought some novelty items from a shop on Oxford Street and this costume Izzy wanted me to wear during our intimate times. I don't know. In short, we tried some of this fantasy stuff which came out in our annual 'relationship performance review'. Man, I do not like the annual RPR but Izzy insists).
So were really annoyed with the people up in 7a for a long time. We complained about them and I left an anonymous note pinned to their door in which I said some pretty direct things, let me tell you. Then we discovered they were mentally impaired. Or whatever the expression is. The signs had been right there in front of us the whole time, we just hadn't seen them! Of course, Izzy and I both felt terrible. We’d been making all these judgements and assumptions about this poor couple and we'd been completely wrong. We felt like complete monsters. Here were these two brave people doing their best to live productive lives. They both worked, they paid their bills and they lived independent lives. And we had been so insensitive, so narrow-minded, wrapped up in our problems, we had completely missed the obvious. Of course! They were both one banana short of a smoothly. And this is exactly what living in the city does to you, right? It makes you selfish. It makes you into an insensitive person.
Anyway, we felt like despicable human beings. So after that, we went out of our way to be nice to the couple in 7a. Instead of snubbing them, as we had in the past when we ran into them in the entrance way or in the laundry area, we always made sure to say HELLO. HOW ARE YOUR TODAY? THE WEATHER IS VERY NICE, ISN’T IT? or DO YOU HAVE ANY SPECIAL PLANS FOR THE WEEKEND?I JUST HEARD THEY OPENED A NEW THAI RESTAURANT AROUND THE CORNER. IT IS SUPPOSED TO BE VERY GOOD. Just normal conversations like that. Because they were no different to anyone else.
And yes, after awhile it became apparent that we were over-compensating a bit with all the shouting, that we needed to tone it down a bit. After all, they were mentally impaired, not deaf for god-sakes. Anyway, Izzy and I were determined to help these people out. We took their laundry off the line when it looked like rain. We signed for their packages and registered mail when they were out. We held the door open when they came in loaded down with groceries. Basically, everything a good neighbour could and should do….that's exactly what we did.
In hindsight, I can see how this compassion overload and neighbourly concern might have freaked them out a bit. What I'm saying is it caused a bit of tension, you know, especially the way our attitude towards them had suddenly done a complete turnaround. It must have felt a little bit like we were stalking them or something. It got to the point where they started trying to avoid us. But no. No way! We were like, sorry folks, we have to make this up to you. We have been monsters and we need to make amends. So, like it or not, from now on we are going to be model neighbours. We are going to help you and improve your lives whether you like it or not. We have messed up our own karma through ignorance and now it is time to correct the imbalance.
One time, I saw the guy from 7a coming out of our local gym. So what did I do? I joined the same gym! I had this plan that we could work out together, right? We could spot each other lifting weights. I saw myself eventually becoming a kind of mentor for this guy. A life coach or something. It couldn't have been easy for him dealing with the prejudices of the world. Anyway, he was on the cross-trainer one afternoon, reflected nine times over in all those surrounding mirrors, slogging his guts out and I walked up to him, like whoa! Dude! What a coincidence! Look who it is! My neighbour! Isn't this a surprise! And I started telling him how brave he and his girlfriend were for overcoming the obstacles life had thrown in their path. How Lizzy and I had the greatest respect for people like them. And he was looking at me with that slightly confused expression his type usually wore. Like he was just a few seconds behind with the old comprehension of what was happening. I told him if there was ANYTHING he and his girlfriend needed, anything at all, all they need to do was knock on our door and we’d help them out. Rain or shine. Now whether he was shy or embarrassed by what I was saying, I don't know. The point is he made a quick retreat from that situation, muttering that he was grateful but it wasn't at all necessary. And when he was gone, it occurred to me that I’d been a complete boob. Again! God, I had so much to learn from these people. They were obviously proud. They didn't want undue attention drawn to their plight. They wanted....no, they deserved anonymity just like anyone else. 'Special treatment' was simply not a part of their language.
I think Izzy and I may have crossed the line when we left the bottle of wine with the card at their front door. A nice gesture but maybe too much. Billy down at the bottle shop assured me this was a very nice drop for the ten bucks I spent. I don't know anything about wine. I mean, I know it comes from grapes. I know you sniff it before you drink it, but that's it. We didn’t even know if people like them were allowed to have alcohol but we decided to give it a try. The bottle and the card were returned, plonked on our front door the following day. The card was opened but the bottle was still sealed thank you very much. The message was pretty darn clear: we are fine without your help. Please back off. As to the contents of the card? Well, Izzy is good with words so she was the one who explained our misunderstanding with their mental conditions. Just to get it all out in the open.
The real kicker came a few nights later. Izzy happened to be standing at our front door, listening. My Izzy has very good hearing and she liked to know what was going on in the building. This is one of the reasons I married her. Her civic mindedness. Anyway, they were both returning from work, climbing the stairs with their wet umbrellas and their groceries. My Izzy heard them talking out there on the landing. They had the nerve to describe us as ‘Those two idiots who live in 5b". Can you believe that? It made me….mad. Furious I mean we are good people. Caring people. And this was what we got in return? Well, it just goes to show you…you can try to help someone but you never know, do you? Sometimes your best inflexions just don’t make the grade.
Anyway, we backed off after that, let me tell you. I ran into Mrs Fletcher a few days later. And according to Mrs Fletcher, the couple in 7a were “normal”. Normal! Well, you could have fooled me, I snorted. Mrs fletched gave me a funny look as I said this.
There should be some kind of law against misrepresenting yourself like that, I continued, working myself up into a state.
Mrs Fletcher goes, like what?
Like they did, I said. The couple up in 7a. It’s as plain as the nose on your face.
And she goes, are you absolutely sure they 'misrepresented' themselves Kevin? I mean why would they do something that?
And I said, have you been listening to what I just said? Have you??
Mrs Fletcher smiled very sweetly and said, Kevin. I have been listening to you. I think it's great how you and Izzy are always so concerned with the well-being of your neighbours. Especially people in this building. I think this is a very admirable quality. I really do....
I nodded. I always liked hearing Mrs fletcher's opinions about these kinds of things. She was retired kindergarten teacher. She worked for like forty years in the same school. Imagine that? All those kids coming through and growing up! She must have known half of the people in Sydney! She once told me that she remembers each and every little face, that she has a...what do you call it....photogenic memory. The clever ones, the not-so-clever ones, the good ones, the bad ones, the strange ones and the "special" ones.
Anyway, she was talking away about how special Izzy and I were. To her. And I must have zoned out or something because then Mrs Fletcher kind of barked out my name the way you do when you want to snap a daydreamer back into the here and now. Like, WAKE UP SLEEPYHEAD!
Look, Kevin, she continued, I would suggest that you and Izzy stop worrying about those people. To me, it sounds very much like, somewhere along the line, you both got the wrong idea about those people 7a? Do you think that a possibility?
I shrugged. Maybe she was right. I still wasn't convinced.
If I were you, said Mrs Fletcher, I would just leave them alone for the time being. I really do think that would be for the best. There's a good boy.
Sunday, 14 May 2017
Tuesday, 9 May 2017
1000 word puzzle
The central metaphor for this long weekend and quite possibly our lives turned out to be a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle someone found in a draw with some other old games. According to the image on the box, the puzzle was of Sydney Harbour. We gravitated towards the dining table that night, for the purposes of drinking wine and vodka, while we talked and began sifting through the mini landfill of puzzle pieces which had been dumped out on the table as a joke. But later, the moment came when, one by one, we had to acknowledge the fact that we'd all become inexplicably obsessed with the completion this puzzle.
If this were a novel or a collection of interconnected short stories about us, about our weekend and lives, the house and the beach would make for a good Australian setting, someone concluded, as our hands moved the pieces across the varnished table top.
At night, the windows of this rented beach house turned black and the crashing surf produced a continual roar of white noise. During the day colourful hang gliders were visible above the headland, corkscrewing slowly down on thermals to land on the beach. The house itself was situated in a shaded gully bursting with spiky subtropical plants. The road led down to the beach and in the other direction, to the shops up on the main highway. Cans of fizzy drink, pies, dream-catchers and lumpy pottery objects produced by a local artist could be purchased here from 9 until 4. We’d brought our own supplies down from the city. We had overstocked the house with grog and food.
At night, when not consumed with the puzzle, we watched reality TV and tried to play 'Crimes Against Humanity'. We watched a show in which people bought cramped but expensive homes in the British countryside. Real people who changed into television characters. These TV couples craved the kind of light and space us city dwellers could only dream about. Or rent for the odd weekend here and there. For me, balancing out this fantasy of leaving the big smoke behind was the fear that the country might be stupefyingly dull. Four days was one thing...but for the rest of your life?
We drank, ate and swam. We swam in the rock pools. The plunge into the cold salt water felt like electricity licking your skin head to toe. The sudden immersion made your heart shiver violently inside your chest. To get back to the carpark, we had to traverse rocks and sand. Small creatures turned like soft gears in the tidal pools between these rocks. The land was in pieces, being broken apart, a geological puzzle, right down to the granular level. These tiny pieces ended up back in the rental house collecting near the drain at the end of our hot showers.
We read fashion magazines and books. We looked at our stupid phones. We cooked meals. But mainly it was about the puzzle. About pattern recognition. About sorting and organising the pieces of one's life into some kind of recognisable order. The collective assembly of corresponding shapes and edge pieces. People trading stories as they tried to work out the tacky big picture.
We joked about how wild we were, with our reduced calorie intake and our metered out drinks. Every top up was carefully itemised and translated into the seedy language of the following day's hangover. We tried to adjust severity through hydration. We joked about our exciting holiday puzzle. Crazy right?
People came and went. Friends with their kids. A teenage brother and sister who looked down at the puzzle taking shape on the dining table and smiled politely at our misplaced enthusiasm.
The image of the Harbour Bridge, of Luna Park and of the apartments clustering the North Shore had taken shape by that point. The clouds and the rippled harbour waters were proving to be far more difficult. A ferry occupied a single puzzle piece but resisted being fitted into its proper position.
We talked about our relationships as we worked. Past and present. About the interlock dynamics of males and females working together, trying to make a combined life. Minor tensions mounted and abated. People checked their messages and talked about how grateful they were to escape the evil rat race. A fat possum appeared on the deck looking for handouts.
On Sunday, the puzzle was nearing completion. The sky was still proving to be a challenge. All that flat, ozone depleted New South Wales blue just wouldn't cooperate and come together. To the left of the Bridge, you could make out the Opera House like a pile of sharp bones. We talked about the missing pieces of our lives. The jobs we wanted. The pipe dreams we'd abandoned. The unfulfilled creative pursuits. The places we still wanted to see. The missing children. The houses we wanted to build. The doors that were already shut.
On the final morning, we had to clean the place up and repack our bags. The puzzle was complete minus one fucking piece which some of us looked for, flipping the lounge cushions over, getting down on our hands and knees, peeling back the rug, opening the vacuum bag before finally giving up. Even though we joked about it, the sense of disappointment was surprisingly real. There was a hole up in the sky, floating up above the Bridge. The metaphor had extended itself in an unforeseen way. The picture would remain incomplete. And maybe that was the point all along. The lesson we needed to learn.
We packed the luggage into the car. As instructed, the key was returned to the same spot under the pot plant.
Sunday, 7 May 2017
The Rolling Stones-Exile On Main Street (1972) May
The album cover (even in tiny print on the cassette case booklet) further indicated the complexity of the album's seeming haphazard assemblage. There was (is) a collage of black and white images. Freakshow performers, vaudeville people, bellydancers and the Stones themselves. Like the music, it felt rough and slapped together. A motley crew of images, songs and performers. You could see the edges of these images, complete with film stock numbers and the sprocket holes of the Kodak negatives. It looked and sounded like it had been put together in a slap-dash way. And what was up with the weird references of colonialism? The images of Indians and the African guy with three oranges stuck in his mouth? It could be nothing. Many rock stars trade in ambiguity and weird juxtapositions. Throw some random lyrics together, some garbage poetry, then work out some music to accompany these words. Then let the fans provide the meaning.
Anyway, the songs start and stop but the general mood of the album perpetuates. Decadence. Boredom. Hanging out at Keith Richard's chateau in the south of France. Anger and the possibility of violence. Time slipping away. Youth buried in the slow or fast accumulation of years. Love. Sex. The hollow trappings of being a spoilt rock star. The patchwork quilt quality of the music was a result of the inclusion of the Blues, Gospel, Rock and Roll, Country and Western (among other influences) performed by a group of gaunt English musicians. Because of the inclusion of extra instruments and guest musicians, Exile on Main Street covers a lot of musical territory over the course of its 18 songs and is a full sounding, layered record. Full and rich but also fuzzed out, echoing through empty spaces, fading in and out, morphing from song to song. Coherent while simultaneously coming apart at the seams, blurring at the edges. At once bleak, perhaps escaping the bummer last years of the 1960's while offering some sort of spiritual hope in the form of Shine a Light & Soul Survivor, hope that the 1970's would hold more promise. Anyway listening to this, in London at that time, I was able to define my position according to one of the life's most telling classifications. Ie. What kind of Rock and Roll fan are you? A Beetles or a Stones fan? Both have clearly defined attributes and qualities. I'd have to go with the Stones myself.
Thursday, 4 May 2017
Thin skin
....anyway, those boys, led by master 'Swiftly'....so they would come in and basically take control of the bar. And this would happen every day, as regular as clockwork, at around 4:45. You'd hear them coming down the street, in high spirits, shouting at each other. It made you stop and wonder why four flash salesmen like these guys were, in their expensive suits and designer sunglasses....why they would have any interest in our place, eh? You know...our bar has always been a very quiet place. Aside from the clientele, little clues of human inertia are evident everywhere: a piece of last year's Christmas tinsel still dangling cheerlessly over the bar, dead flies collecting in hard to reach places and the taste of stale air recycled back through the AC unit. We are talking about zero atmospheres. I had no idea why those boys came in every day.
Actually, that's not entirely true. There were several obvious reasons, ya? It was right around the corner from their office building and the manager of the pub, Derrick, would put up with their bullshit because they spent money. And I mean, a lot of money, you know? Princess, the girl who worked behind the bar during the week, she was a pushover as far as those hooligans were concerned. What did you expect? She was one of these young girls with a bubble for a brain. Swifty had her wrapped around his little finger. You know how the young girls are these days? With their cell phones and their need for validation.
Anyway, these guys, Swiftly and his mob, they'd come in shouting and shoving each other around, carrying on like school boys. And they would instantly change the atmosphere of the place. Us regulars, we would just keep our heads down and do our best to ignore the dickhead comments about the bar being an old age pensioner home. 'God's waiting room' was an expression they kicked around quite a bit, saying we were a bunch of 'old soft cocks', you know? 'Drooling old jokes'. Those boys had fucking endless smart-ass comments about our half strength beers, our prescription reading glasses and our chicken shit two dollar bets lining the bar. I'd just smile and think to myself, wait until it happens to you sunshine. If you live that long, eh?
Listen, I had two teenage boys, ya? So I know. Just like my Angus, these guys were constantly testing our boundaries, seeing how much they could get away with, you know? So the only way to deal with them was to not to play their game, ya? Simple. Ignore them. And I know Swifty. I mean, I have met men like him before. His type. Swiftly is the kind who will push the joke to the very limit, ya? He is the classic sadist hiding in the guise of a joker. If you can read people, like I can, you'd pick up on this the moment you met him. He was very charming and intelligent but he had the curling smile of a sadist. He was alert to human weakness like a shark can smell a drop of blood in the ocean. Swifty would lead you in one direction, getting you all upset and bent out of shape, and then he would switch gears, you know? He would say, 'Just joking mate' and 'What's the matter with you? Eh? You can't take a joke?' So he will put it back in you, as if you were the sensitive, and therefore weaker party. As if you couldn't take a little bit of teasing.
Like I say, these boys didn't bother with me. No. You know I am from South Africa. After Apartheid ended my farm was robbed twice. At gun point. So this level of intimidation? This schoolyard stuff...it doesn't bother me. I just don't rate it is something worth getting upset about. It's all comes down to perspective, eh? Because there is something very important you have to keep in mind: these guys, these local guys, they grew up in this big, empty, sprawling state, ya? So what I am saying is, nothing has really happened here apart from a gold rush followed by the mining boom. Sudden spurts of economic growth. Transient population. A few local celebrity millionaires made good. Otherwise, it's track housing stretched to the horizon, empty streets and parks. Shopping centres. They don't know what intimidation and violence are really like apart from what they see on the telly, eh? For them, it's all schoolyard bully stuff. Playing war. And you know what amazes me? I mean, I understand why but it has to be this way but...instead of being thankful, of appreciating that you have this relatively peaceful history, these guys have something to prove, ya? There is a big chip on their shoulders. And like I say, I get it, you know? Young men who are untested feel like they're living a half a life. It's just human nature. Or at least for males. Why do you think little boys run around with guns, shooting each other?
Anyway, these guys never bothered me. All you have to do it ignore it. The problem is exasperated when you to react to them. This is what the bully wants from his victim, eh? A reaction. Plain and simple. And they got under Grant's skin alright. That much was obvious from the start. When they realised that me and Sven weren't going to take the bait, they focused pretty much exclusively on Grant. They'd wind him up every single day. It was sport for them. It was fun. It started with little digs, you know? Little comments and jabs. Nothing too serious. But then it got worse. Much worse.
And Grant was....well....Grant was Grant, eh? We all knew Grant was a bit special. A bit of a sad and lonely guy. There was something not right with the poor bugger upstairs, ya? He wasn't playing with a full deck of cards. It was very subtle but the longer you knew him, the more you'd notice it. I would describe this psychological flaw as an emotional disconnect. A dead spot in his personality. Basically, he had trouble communicating his feelings and relating to other people, eh? He was a state licenced investigator-security consultant. Or at least that's what his business card proudly proclaimed. What he really did wasn't exactly like a James Bond movie. Or, what was that old TV show? Magnum PI? No red Ferraris, no beautiful babes. Grant just sat around, watching people scamming the government. He would collect information for caseworkers to use as evidence. He filmed these people, these scammers, in shopping centres and on the street. He had little cameras. Tiny little cameras that he would conceal in his clothing and in a gym bag. Grant was very good at blending in. He was like a chameleon. Just another face in the crowd. He had a pair of dark sunglasses which reflected what was happening behind you, over your shoulder. Gadgets like that, ya? He would show us all this spy stuff that he bought online. He was a real gadget guy. That was the Grant we all knew. The Grant who showed up at the bar every day. In his private life, he would post photos of himself on Facebook, holding a pair of brass knuckles and replica guns. Like that, you know? Action man. Always in the background of these photos, you could see the same sad little one bedroom apartment in Mount Lawley. Brick walls. A kitchenette.
Anyway, adding to his woes, Swifty and his boys would pass the time teasing Grant and he would take the bait. Grant took it all so personally, ya? I'd pull him aside, say to him, 'Grant man...just chill out. Don't worry about it'. I'd say, 'Listen....you're a middle-aged man. Do you really put any value on what these guys are saying? You can't let them get to you. These guys are young and stupid and all they can think to do with their time is come here, into this shitty pub and bother a bunch of old farts like us? Come on man....what does that tell you? Eh? Eh? It tells you these guys are losers, ya?'
Swifty and his boys did things like putting hot sauce in Grant's drink and fucking about with his cell phone. They took the hubcaps off his car and they messed around with his bar stool. Petty shit like that. They fooled about with his precious briefcase which was...well, you need to understand that Grant's briefcase was strickly off-limits. Grant kept all his important things in there. His precious gadgets and his documents. All those kinds of things. So when they fooled around with the briefcase, when they hid it, poured beer on it...Grant got very upset. And as a result, this teasing became a self-perpetuating cycle. The more they wound Grant up, the bigger and more emotional his reactions became, the more the boys were tempted to continue pushing his buttons. It was a way to pass the time. I have found that one sure fire way for the lower man to define and maintain his social standing is to humiliate individuals outside the circle of mateship, ya? This is an easy way maintain rank. Anyway, Swifty just kept pushing and pushing, exploiting all those little cracks in Grant's personality.
'Swifty'....I've never understood why a fully grown man would perpetuate some ridiculous nickname he picked up as a youth, eh? Why he would drag such a name into his adult life. 'Swifty'. Jesus Christ. It all had something to do with his microscopically brief career as country footie star. Before the ill-fated shoulder injury, we all had to hear about each time he got pissed. His big moment of glory out on the pitch. Of course, there was a long, tiresome story behind why and how he acquired the nickname 'Swifty'. A story which I was forced to overhear many, many times. A story which I always make a point of forgetting.
Grant was a very sensitive guy. That much is clear. He tried to make out like he wasn't....but he was. He was one these guys who will internalise everything, dwell on it, chew on it, until later. And as I said, those boys just kept pushing and pushing, ya? Then, one summer evening Grant snapped big time. He made a huge scene. I think in his mind, Grant thought he was standing up to them like an action movie star might do in a film. But in the end, he just made a fool of himself. Swifty was a big man with a quick wit. Grant was no match. And when words failed, when push came to shove, Grant didn't have the balls to take on Swifty. The reality was, Grant had a heart the size of a pea. So in the end, what should have been the victim standing up to the bully, backfired in Grant's face. A chasm of humiliation opened up under his feet, swallowed him whole. We all saw it. We turned away. In response to that confrontation, Grant's attempt at bravery, instead of showing a little humanity, a little understanding, Swiftly went in for the kill. All pretences asides, he got openly nasty. He backed Grant up against the bar, pinned him with a jabbing finger to the face, called him a little parasite shit, a leech whose main purpose in life was preying off human misfortune. He made out....he characterised Grant as a stooge for the government. A grass. A rat. Lowest of the low. All this kind of business, eh? In that moment Swifty decided to break him. No more messing around. It was a very bad combination. Swiftly had that Aussie larrikin disregard for authority. When he looked at Grant, Swifty didn't see a portly middle-aged man simply trying to enjoy a few beers at the end of another pointless day. No. Grant had come to represent authority in all its ineptitudes. I understand this. Sure. Policy enacted by a prissy little guy with a briefcase. And like I say, it was a natural response for Swifty, ya? Challenging authority. But what Swifty didn't understand was, for Grant, the pub and his snooping surveillance job was basically was his entire life. As I have indicated, Grant had nothing else. He would show up every single day, rain or shine, at five o'clock with his little briefcase. He always drank five light strength beers and then he drove home. Rain or shine. I think that apart from his brother, who lived over in Sydney, we were the only human contact this poor bastard had, eh? I seem to remember there was some talk of a Thai mail order bride but Grant never followed through with that. He wouldn't know what to do with a woman if one dropped on his lap. Even if she was naked and feeling sexy. Anyway, the bar was an integral part of his routine and we were his family. And he derived a great deal of comfort from this familiarity. We would sit there and basically have the same conversation every day, over and over again...'How are you going Grant?'....this and that. Grant would tell us all about the people he was following and we'd say 'So Grant are you close to cracking the big case yet?' And sometimes we would have a bit of a laugh at his expense but it was never anything nasty or mean-spirited, eh? Not like Swifty.
The final straw came when Swifty wrote on the bathroom wall. He wrote 'The PI is a soft cock'. Right there on the tiles, right above the urinals for everyone to see. This was more than just a simple written slur. This cut deep, eh? Not only had Swifty defaced the bar, Grant's second home, he had also vandalised Grant's professional reputation and character for all to see. In response to this, Grant asked the manager to clean it off. Which he did. Eventually. After much humiliating nagging on Grant's end. And as soon as it was cleaned off? Well....Swifty went right back in there, stood with his cock one hand and his felt tip pen in the other, and he did it again. So it became this war of attrition. The graffiti would get cleaned off. Then it would reappear a few days later. And it went on like this for a quite a while. A cycle. Neither side willing or able to back down.
It was just a normal afternoon, the horses being lined up in Melbourne on the feed. Princess was standing behind the bar, hypnotised by her cell phone. The regulars were in their usual spots. Sven had just come back from the toilets, drying his hands on his suit pants, his eyes fixed on the screen as the track stewards corralled the horse into the starting gates. We had our betting tickets lined up on the beer mat. Between races, I was flicking through the newspaper. I remember looking at some holiday specials for South East Asia packages. They seemed very cheap. Swifty and his mates were already there, leaning up against the bar, drinking and carrying on as usual. Swifty had his sunglasses propped up on his head and I think he was telling the boys a story about some girl he'd messed around with the previous evening. Anyway, his voice had the lurid tones he reserved for this kind of story. And I wasn't listening.
There was some sort of confusion by the front entrance which is not visible from where I sit. There was a jarring sound. Initially, I thought it came from the TV mounted over the bar. It sounded like a heavy book being dropped on a hardwood floor. A flat, sudden sound interrupting the ambient noise to which we were all contributing. One of the boys standing next to Swifty jerked backwards and then dropped like a trap door had opened beneath his feet. I thought it was just more of their messing about, ya? They were always tackling each other, bringing each other to the ground. Or maybe he tripped on something? I couldn't tell. Anyway, suddenly they were all shouting. And not the usual silly buggers type of larking around either. No. I mean fearful, chaotic shouting. The other boys, they bolted around the bar and then I saw Grant walk into view with a rifle in his hands.
In the security footage, you can see him enter on the left side of the screen just above the timecode. This is the camera positioned over the TAB machine. It's a grainy, black and white image. The boy Grant shot is lying on the ground, face down and not moving. Grant doesn't waste any more time with him. He raises his rifle, points it at one of the other boys who is fleeing across the bar room floor. Then you see a silent puff of smoke issued from the muzzle and the kick of the rifle against Grant's shoulder, sending a visible shock through his body.
This police say Grant got this rifle from his uncle's farm. It had been maintained and correctly stored for a very long time, apparently waiting for this very afternoon. His uncle had ignored the amnesty, ya? Back when in the Johnny Howard days, after that business at Port Arthur. The uncle kept the gun in his shed. In a storage locker. It was a .243 bolt action rifle. Grant had often fired it as a boy out in the bush. Tree stumps and kangaroos. Grant's second shot hit the next boy in the back as he was trying to get through the exit into the beer garden. The bullet went right between this boy's shoulder blades, made a mess of his suit. By this time, living up to his nickname Swiftly had made it to the men's toilets.
Grant stopped and looked at us. Sven and I were just sitting there in a state of shock, trying to process what was happening. You know how they say time becomes a viscous, slow substance when you are under this kind of duress? When someone is waving a gun in your face? Well, it's true. I mean, I saw motes of dust suspended in a beam of afternoon sunlight which was falling across the bottles lined up on the back wall of the bar. My heart stopped in my chest. Time behaves very differently in these circumstances. Every moment cracks open to reveal a concealed eternity within. Also, from this point on, it was very clear what was going to happen. It was a junction. I was going to come out of this either alive or dead. Very simple, eh? Black or white. And I could have tried to run or tried to reason with Grant but I don't remember moving of saying anything. I just sat there, my hands on the bar, waiting for the outcome. Grant looked at me for a moment, weighing me up, trying to determine if, in this final judgement, if I was a friend or foe. One door leads to more life. More time. The other one is an exit. And you know, in that moment, the muzzle of the rifle swinging my way, I was thinking back, taking stock. Technically speaking, I was always on Grant's side but were there not a few nagging incidents? When the boys were taunting him and a smile may possibly have crept across my face? A slight ghost of a smile that Grant may have caught in the corner of his eye? Showing that I was capable of deriving some entertainment from his suffering? His torture.
But then the moment passed and Grant moved on, clicking back into hunting mode. There would be no bullet for me. Princess was just standing there, in the doorway leading into the cooler room, her mouth open and her eyes wide. Grant took aim at her chest but then changed his mind. They say he only had a handful of bullets. I'll tell you, that look in his eyes, it was frightening. And not only his eyes. It was almost like his entire face had changed in a number of very subtle ways. It was like looking at someone for the first time. Trying to read their intentions yet failing to do so.
Grant moved around the bar, heading across the dance floor, threading between the tables in front of the little stage, towards the men's toilet. He was after Swiftly. As soon as he went in through the door, the gun muzzle probing ahead into the tiled gloom of the men's, we all got the hell out of there. Princess was frozen on the spot, muttering something about the cash register so I had to run around the bar, grabbed her and dragged her out. We had to leave the wounded boy behind. There was no telling how long Grant would be in the toilet. Sven was propping open the front door. We left everything behind: all our money, smokes, our drinks. We ran across the parking lot, up the main street and into the little park near Lemon street. Luckily Princess had her mobile so we called the cops. After ten minutes we began to hear overlapping sirens in the distance, the sound climbing up out of the surrounding silence.
They found Swifty dead in the men's toilet. They went in dressed in jumpsuits and paper booties. From the physical evidence, they easily ascertained that Swifty had tried to escape through the little window above one of the toilet stalls. This was a futile attempt. The wire mesh had been far too strong for him to break through and as a result, he'd only succeeded in bloodying his hands as he tried to punch his way out. It wouldn't have mattered anyway. He would have been too big to climb through the opening. He would have been better off trying to tackle Grant. At least then he would have stood a chance. People do funny things when faced with mortal danger. Sometimes the tough guy goes meek and the meek guy turns into the hero. You can never tell. As it was, Grant put three bullets in Swifty. One in the back, one in the head and one through his side. They found Swifty in the middle stall, crumpled up around the bog, his brains on the tile.
According to the police timeline, there then followed a bit of a stand-off with the cops surrounding the place. During that time Grant finished off the salesman he had previously wounded. That boy had attempted to crawl out the front door but only made it to the betting station. In all likelihood, he wouldn't have survived anyway. He left far too much blood behind, a large swath of vital fluid which he painted across the wooden floor, marking his slow but ultimately pointless attempt. The other one, the boy Grant had shot trying to get out through the beer garden exit was already dead. The fourth one, Mick, was hiding in the cooler room, behind a stack of kegs, shaking with cold and fear. He was jammed in a very small space. Wisely he didn't move until the cops cleared the place out. Grant assumed incorrectly that he had escaped.
After all the killing, the security footage shows Grant sitting for a time at the empty bar, seemingly lost in his own thoughts, the rifle within easy reach. Then, like a rugby team brandishing handguns, the police came barreling in through the front door and pinned him to the floor. This was the beginning of Grant's long journey through the legal and medical system, the slow digestion of the man Grant had once been through the intestinal tract of a bureaucratic creature. A journey partially reported on with typical blood lust by the local press. A journey which would eventually land him for the remainder of his Thorazine drooling days in the Graylands psychiatric hospital.
A week later we were all back in the bar, sitting in our usual spots like nothing had happened. We drank our drinks and we put our bets down, waiting for the gates to spring open, releasing the horses and the dogs. They cleaned up the blood. Princess came back to work, talked badly of Grant. I didn't participate in any of this. The poor girl has a breakdown some days later, just couldn't function with the memory of what happened. This was completely understandable. She went off to seek some professional help.
As I say, the papers made a meal out of the whole thing. There were photos of Grant in his suit being led out of the courthouse, his hands in cuffs. His face looked blank. Resigned. This was not the Grant we knew from before. They twisted his character to fit into their narrative. I made some altruistic plans to go visit him up there in the nuthouse but I never followed through. This always bothered me. Alcohol made us brothers but that bond was only maintained when it was convenient to do so. And really, it didn't extend beyond the pub's front door. While I pissing that beer away, standing with my nose up against the tiles in the toilet, I could still faintly make out Swiftly's graffiti on the wall. In those moments of quiet reflection, I was tempted to change the course of my life, to pry my ass off that bloody bar stool and walk out the front door. I could have picked the phone and visited my son. I could have done a lot of things. There was still time. But then I remembered something very important. I had just put some bets down. There was a trifecta I had a very good feeling about. So I came back from the toilets and took my place next to Sven. And up on the telly, the gates sprung open in Sydney and the horses were released.
Actually, that's not entirely true. There were several obvious reasons, ya? It was right around the corner from their office building and the manager of the pub, Derrick, would put up with their bullshit because they spent money. And I mean, a lot of money, you know? Princess, the girl who worked behind the bar during the week, she was a pushover as far as those hooligans were concerned. What did you expect? She was one of these young girls with a bubble for a brain. Swifty had her wrapped around his little finger. You know how the young girls are these days? With their cell phones and their need for validation.
Anyway, these guys, Swiftly and his mob, they'd come in shouting and shoving each other around, carrying on like school boys. And they would instantly change the atmosphere of the place. Us regulars, we would just keep our heads down and do our best to ignore the dickhead comments about the bar being an old age pensioner home. 'God's waiting room' was an expression they kicked around quite a bit, saying we were a bunch of 'old soft cocks', you know? 'Drooling old jokes'. Those boys had fucking endless smart-ass comments about our half strength beers, our prescription reading glasses and our chicken shit two dollar bets lining the bar. I'd just smile and think to myself, wait until it happens to you sunshine. If you live that long, eh?
Listen, I had two teenage boys, ya? So I know. Just like my Angus, these guys were constantly testing our boundaries, seeing how much they could get away with, you know? So the only way to deal with them was to not to play their game, ya? Simple. Ignore them. And I know Swifty. I mean, I have met men like him before. His type. Swiftly is the kind who will push the joke to the very limit, ya? He is the classic sadist hiding in the guise of a joker. If you can read people, like I can, you'd pick up on this the moment you met him. He was very charming and intelligent but he had the curling smile of a sadist. He was alert to human weakness like a shark can smell a drop of blood in the ocean. Swifty would lead you in one direction, getting you all upset and bent out of shape, and then he would switch gears, you know? He would say, 'Just joking mate' and 'What's the matter with you? Eh? You can't take a joke?' So he will put it back in you, as if you were the sensitive, and therefore weaker party. As if you couldn't take a little bit of teasing.
Like I say, these boys didn't bother with me. No. You know I am from South Africa. After Apartheid ended my farm was robbed twice. At gun point. So this level of intimidation? This schoolyard stuff...it doesn't bother me. I just don't rate it is something worth getting upset about. It's all comes down to perspective, eh? Because there is something very important you have to keep in mind: these guys, these local guys, they grew up in this big, empty, sprawling state, ya? So what I am saying is, nothing has really happened here apart from a gold rush followed by the mining boom. Sudden spurts of economic growth. Transient population. A few local celebrity millionaires made good. Otherwise, it's track housing stretched to the horizon, empty streets and parks. Shopping centres. They don't know what intimidation and violence are really like apart from what they see on the telly, eh? For them, it's all schoolyard bully stuff. Playing war. And you know what amazes me? I mean, I understand why but it has to be this way but...instead of being thankful, of appreciating that you have this relatively peaceful history, these guys have something to prove, ya? There is a big chip on their shoulders. And like I say, I get it, you know? Young men who are untested feel like they're living a half a life. It's just human nature. Or at least for males. Why do you think little boys run around with guns, shooting each other?
Anyway, these guys never bothered me. All you have to do it ignore it. The problem is exasperated when you to react to them. This is what the bully wants from his victim, eh? A reaction. Plain and simple. And they got under Grant's skin alright. That much was obvious from the start. When they realised that me and Sven weren't going to take the bait, they focused pretty much exclusively on Grant. They'd wind him up every single day. It was sport for them. It was fun. It started with little digs, you know? Little comments and jabs. Nothing too serious. But then it got worse. Much worse.
And Grant was....well....Grant was Grant, eh? We all knew Grant was a bit special. A bit of a sad and lonely guy. There was something not right with the poor bugger upstairs, ya? He wasn't playing with a full deck of cards. It was very subtle but the longer you knew him, the more you'd notice it. I would describe this psychological flaw as an emotional disconnect. A dead spot in his personality. Basically, he had trouble communicating his feelings and relating to other people, eh? He was a state licenced investigator-security consultant. Or at least that's what his business card proudly proclaimed. What he really did wasn't exactly like a James Bond movie. Or, what was that old TV show? Magnum PI? No red Ferraris, no beautiful babes. Grant just sat around, watching people scamming the government. He would collect information for caseworkers to use as evidence. He filmed these people, these scammers, in shopping centres and on the street. He had little cameras. Tiny little cameras that he would conceal in his clothing and in a gym bag. Grant was very good at blending in. He was like a chameleon. Just another face in the crowd. He had a pair of dark sunglasses which reflected what was happening behind you, over your shoulder. Gadgets like that, ya? He would show us all this spy stuff that he bought online. He was a real gadget guy. That was the Grant we all knew. The Grant who showed up at the bar every day. In his private life, he would post photos of himself on Facebook, holding a pair of brass knuckles and replica guns. Like that, you know? Action man. Always in the background of these photos, you could see the same sad little one bedroom apartment in Mount Lawley. Brick walls. A kitchenette.
Anyway, adding to his woes, Swifty and his boys would pass the time teasing Grant and he would take the bait. Grant took it all so personally, ya? I'd pull him aside, say to him, 'Grant man...just chill out. Don't worry about it'. I'd say, 'Listen....you're a middle-aged man. Do you really put any value on what these guys are saying? You can't let them get to you. These guys are young and stupid and all they can think to do with their time is come here, into this shitty pub and bother a bunch of old farts like us? Come on man....what does that tell you? Eh? Eh? It tells you these guys are losers, ya?'
Swifty and his boys did things like putting hot sauce in Grant's drink and fucking about with his cell phone. They took the hubcaps off his car and they messed around with his bar stool. Petty shit like that. They fooled about with his precious briefcase which was...well, you need to understand that Grant's briefcase was strickly off-limits. Grant kept all his important things in there. His precious gadgets and his documents. All those kinds of things. So when they fooled around with the briefcase, when they hid it, poured beer on it...Grant got very upset. And as a result, this teasing became a self-perpetuating cycle. The more they wound Grant up, the bigger and more emotional his reactions became, the more the boys were tempted to continue pushing his buttons. It was a way to pass the time. I have found that one sure fire way for the lower man to define and maintain his social standing is to humiliate individuals outside the circle of mateship, ya? This is an easy way maintain rank. Anyway, Swifty just kept pushing and pushing, exploiting all those little cracks in Grant's personality.
'Swifty'....I've never understood why a fully grown man would perpetuate some ridiculous nickname he picked up as a youth, eh? Why he would drag such a name into his adult life. 'Swifty'. Jesus Christ. It all had something to do with his microscopically brief career as country footie star. Before the ill-fated shoulder injury, we all had to hear about each time he got pissed. His big moment of glory out on the pitch. Of course, there was a long, tiresome story behind why and how he acquired the nickname 'Swifty'. A story which I was forced to overhear many, many times. A story which I always make a point of forgetting.
Grant was a very sensitive guy. That much is clear. He tried to make out like he wasn't....but he was. He was one these guys who will internalise everything, dwell on it, chew on it, until later. And as I said, those boys just kept pushing and pushing, ya? Then, one summer evening Grant snapped big time. He made a huge scene. I think in his mind, Grant thought he was standing up to them like an action movie star might do in a film. But in the end, he just made a fool of himself. Swifty was a big man with a quick wit. Grant was no match. And when words failed, when push came to shove, Grant didn't have the balls to take on Swifty. The reality was, Grant had a heart the size of a pea. So in the end, what should have been the victim standing up to the bully, backfired in Grant's face. A chasm of humiliation opened up under his feet, swallowed him whole. We all saw it. We turned away. In response to that confrontation, Grant's attempt at bravery, instead of showing a little humanity, a little understanding, Swiftly went in for the kill. All pretences asides, he got openly nasty. He backed Grant up against the bar, pinned him with a jabbing finger to the face, called him a little parasite shit, a leech whose main purpose in life was preying off human misfortune. He made out....he characterised Grant as a stooge for the government. A grass. A rat. Lowest of the low. All this kind of business, eh? In that moment Swifty decided to break him. No more messing around. It was a very bad combination. Swiftly had that Aussie larrikin disregard for authority. When he looked at Grant, Swifty didn't see a portly middle-aged man simply trying to enjoy a few beers at the end of another pointless day. No. Grant had come to represent authority in all its ineptitudes. I understand this. Sure. Policy enacted by a prissy little guy with a briefcase. And like I say, it was a natural response for Swifty, ya? Challenging authority. But what Swifty didn't understand was, for Grant, the pub and his snooping surveillance job was basically was his entire life. As I have indicated, Grant had nothing else. He would show up every single day, rain or shine, at five o'clock with his little briefcase. He always drank five light strength beers and then he drove home. Rain or shine. I think that apart from his brother, who lived over in Sydney, we were the only human contact this poor bastard had, eh? I seem to remember there was some talk of a Thai mail order bride but Grant never followed through with that. He wouldn't know what to do with a woman if one dropped on his lap. Even if she was naked and feeling sexy. Anyway, the bar was an integral part of his routine and we were his family. And he derived a great deal of comfort from this familiarity. We would sit there and basically have the same conversation every day, over and over again...'How are you going Grant?'....this and that. Grant would tell us all about the people he was following and we'd say 'So Grant are you close to cracking the big case yet?' And sometimes we would have a bit of a laugh at his expense but it was never anything nasty or mean-spirited, eh? Not like Swifty.
The final straw came when Swifty wrote on the bathroom wall. He wrote 'The PI is a soft cock'. Right there on the tiles, right above the urinals for everyone to see. This was more than just a simple written slur. This cut deep, eh? Not only had Swifty defaced the bar, Grant's second home, he had also vandalised Grant's professional reputation and character for all to see. In response to this, Grant asked the manager to clean it off. Which he did. Eventually. After much humiliating nagging on Grant's end. And as soon as it was cleaned off? Well....Swifty went right back in there, stood with his cock one hand and his felt tip pen in the other, and he did it again. So it became this war of attrition. The graffiti would get cleaned off. Then it would reappear a few days later. And it went on like this for a quite a while. A cycle. Neither side willing or able to back down.
It was just a normal afternoon, the horses being lined up in Melbourne on the feed. Princess was standing behind the bar, hypnotised by her cell phone. The regulars were in their usual spots. Sven had just come back from the toilets, drying his hands on his suit pants, his eyes fixed on the screen as the track stewards corralled the horse into the starting gates. We had our betting tickets lined up on the beer mat. Between races, I was flicking through the newspaper. I remember looking at some holiday specials for South East Asia packages. They seemed very cheap. Swifty and his mates were already there, leaning up against the bar, drinking and carrying on as usual. Swifty had his sunglasses propped up on his head and I think he was telling the boys a story about some girl he'd messed around with the previous evening. Anyway, his voice had the lurid tones he reserved for this kind of story. And I wasn't listening.
There was some sort of confusion by the front entrance which is not visible from where I sit. There was a jarring sound. Initially, I thought it came from the TV mounted over the bar. It sounded like a heavy book being dropped on a hardwood floor. A flat, sudden sound interrupting the ambient noise to which we were all contributing. One of the boys standing next to Swifty jerked backwards and then dropped like a trap door had opened beneath his feet. I thought it was just more of their messing about, ya? They were always tackling each other, bringing each other to the ground. Or maybe he tripped on something? I couldn't tell. Anyway, suddenly they were all shouting. And not the usual silly buggers type of larking around either. No. I mean fearful, chaotic shouting. The other boys, they bolted around the bar and then I saw Grant walk into view with a rifle in his hands.
In the security footage, you can see him enter on the left side of the screen just above the timecode. This is the camera positioned over the TAB machine. It's a grainy, black and white image. The boy Grant shot is lying on the ground, face down and not moving. Grant doesn't waste any more time with him. He raises his rifle, points it at one of the other boys who is fleeing across the bar room floor. Then you see a silent puff of smoke issued from the muzzle and the kick of the rifle against Grant's shoulder, sending a visible shock through his body.
This police say Grant got this rifle from his uncle's farm. It had been maintained and correctly stored for a very long time, apparently waiting for this very afternoon. His uncle had ignored the amnesty, ya? Back when in the Johnny Howard days, after that business at Port Arthur. The uncle kept the gun in his shed. In a storage locker. It was a .243 bolt action rifle. Grant had often fired it as a boy out in the bush. Tree stumps and kangaroos. Grant's second shot hit the next boy in the back as he was trying to get through the exit into the beer garden. The bullet went right between this boy's shoulder blades, made a mess of his suit. By this time, living up to his nickname Swiftly had made it to the men's toilets.
Grant stopped and looked at us. Sven and I were just sitting there in a state of shock, trying to process what was happening. You know how they say time becomes a viscous, slow substance when you are under this kind of duress? When someone is waving a gun in your face? Well, it's true. I mean, I saw motes of dust suspended in a beam of afternoon sunlight which was falling across the bottles lined up on the back wall of the bar. My heart stopped in my chest. Time behaves very differently in these circumstances. Every moment cracks open to reveal a concealed eternity within. Also, from this point on, it was very clear what was going to happen. It was a junction. I was going to come out of this either alive or dead. Very simple, eh? Black or white. And I could have tried to run or tried to reason with Grant but I don't remember moving of saying anything. I just sat there, my hands on the bar, waiting for the outcome. Grant looked at me for a moment, weighing me up, trying to determine if, in this final judgement, if I was a friend or foe. One door leads to more life. More time. The other one is an exit. And you know, in that moment, the muzzle of the rifle swinging my way, I was thinking back, taking stock. Technically speaking, I was always on Grant's side but were there not a few nagging incidents? When the boys were taunting him and a smile may possibly have crept across my face? A slight ghost of a smile that Grant may have caught in the corner of his eye? Showing that I was capable of deriving some entertainment from his suffering? His torture.
But then the moment passed and Grant moved on, clicking back into hunting mode. There would be no bullet for me. Princess was just standing there, in the doorway leading into the cooler room, her mouth open and her eyes wide. Grant took aim at her chest but then changed his mind. They say he only had a handful of bullets. I'll tell you, that look in his eyes, it was frightening. And not only his eyes. It was almost like his entire face had changed in a number of very subtle ways. It was like looking at someone for the first time. Trying to read their intentions yet failing to do so.
Grant moved around the bar, heading across the dance floor, threading between the tables in front of the little stage, towards the men's toilet. He was after Swiftly. As soon as he went in through the door, the gun muzzle probing ahead into the tiled gloom of the men's, we all got the hell out of there. Princess was frozen on the spot, muttering something about the cash register so I had to run around the bar, grabbed her and dragged her out. We had to leave the wounded boy behind. There was no telling how long Grant would be in the toilet. Sven was propping open the front door. We left everything behind: all our money, smokes, our drinks. We ran across the parking lot, up the main street and into the little park near Lemon street. Luckily Princess had her mobile so we called the cops. After ten minutes we began to hear overlapping sirens in the distance, the sound climbing up out of the surrounding silence.
They found Swifty dead in the men's toilet. They went in dressed in jumpsuits and paper booties. From the physical evidence, they easily ascertained that Swifty had tried to escape through the little window above one of the toilet stalls. This was a futile attempt. The wire mesh had been far too strong for him to break through and as a result, he'd only succeeded in bloodying his hands as he tried to punch his way out. It wouldn't have mattered anyway. He would have been too big to climb through the opening. He would have been better off trying to tackle Grant. At least then he would have stood a chance. People do funny things when faced with mortal danger. Sometimes the tough guy goes meek and the meek guy turns into the hero. You can never tell. As it was, Grant put three bullets in Swifty. One in the back, one in the head and one through his side. They found Swifty in the middle stall, crumpled up around the bog, his brains on the tile.
According to the police timeline, there then followed a bit of a stand-off with the cops surrounding the place. During that time Grant finished off the salesman he had previously wounded. That boy had attempted to crawl out the front door but only made it to the betting station. In all likelihood, he wouldn't have survived anyway. He left far too much blood behind, a large swath of vital fluid which he painted across the wooden floor, marking his slow but ultimately pointless attempt. The other one, the boy Grant had shot trying to get out through the beer garden exit was already dead. The fourth one, Mick, was hiding in the cooler room, behind a stack of kegs, shaking with cold and fear. He was jammed in a very small space. Wisely he didn't move until the cops cleared the place out. Grant assumed incorrectly that he had escaped.
After all the killing, the security footage shows Grant sitting for a time at the empty bar, seemingly lost in his own thoughts, the rifle within easy reach. Then, like a rugby team brandishing handguns, the police came barreling in through the front door and pinned him to the floor. This was the beginning of Grant's long journey through the legal and medical system, the slow digestion of the man Grant had once been through the intestinal tract of a bureaucratic creature. A journey partially reported on with typical blood lust by the local press. A journey which would eventually land him for the remainder of his Thorazine drooling days in the Graylands psychiatric hospital.
A week later we were all back in the bar, sitting in our usual spots like nothing had happened. We drank our drinks and we put our bets down, waiting for the gates to spring open, releasing the horses and the dogs. They cleaned up the blood. Princess came back to work, talked badly of Grant. I didn't participate in any of this. The poor girl has a breakdown some days later, just couldn't function with the memory of what happened. This was completely understandable. She went off to seek some professional help.
As I say, the papers made a meal out of the whole thing. There were photos of Grant in his suit being led out of the courthouse, his hands in cuffs. His face looked blank. Resigned. This was not the Grant we knew from before. They twisted his character to fit into their narrative. I made some altruistic plans to go visit him up there in the nuthouse but I never followed through. This always bothered me. Alcohol made us brothers but that bond was only maintained when it was convenient to do so. And really, it didn't extend beyond the pub's front door. While I pissing that beer away, standing with my nose up against the tiles in the toilet, I could still faintly make out Swiftly's graffiti on the wall. In those moments of quiet reflection, I was tempted to change the course of my life, to pry my ass off that bloody bar stool and walk out the front door. I could have picked the phone and visited my son. I could have done a lot of things. There was still time. But then I remembered something very important. I had just put some bets down. There was a trifecta I had a very good feeling about. So I came back from the toilets and took my place next to Sven. And up on the telly, the gates sprung open in Sydney and the horses were released.
Thursday, 20 April 2017
Dentist
My priest....
...did I just say priest?
I meant my dentist....
(...jesus, where did that come from?)
...anyway he killed himself the other day.
I don't mean to sound flippant about all this...
.....I mean, its a sad, terrible thing
...of course it is.
I read somewhere that, statistically speaking, a relatively higher percentage of dentists...
...you know...kill themselves....
...compared to other medical practitioners.
What is it about dentists?
Is it because they spend all day looking down into all those gaping mouths?
....all those teeth....
...is it really so bad?
Maybe it's seeing all those people squirm and grimace?
...jerking in pain...
...gripping the arm rest...
...white-knuckling it...
...terrified of those shiny implements
that little stainless steel sickle-shaped one is by far the worst. I hate that thing.
For me it's the high pitched sound of the drill...
...that is one of my least favourite sounds in the world.
Anyway, no one is happy to be in that chair...are they?
Certainly not me...
...for me, no matter how hard I brushed, eventually the drill came out.
English teeth.
In terms of suicide...you would think it would be the proctologists right?
...at the end of the biological process.
Anyway....
I couldn't put it together...
...why my dentist would do it.
At first it didn't seem to make sense.
At first.
He was a wiry guy...
...brisk but professional.
He was bald with thin hairy arms.
Basically, exactly what you'd expect a dentist to look and behave like.
And he had been my dentist for....
...well, ever since I moved to Sydney with my husband in 2005.
According to his family, there was no indication or warning signs.
And the same goes for me...
...in my limited capacity as one of his patients.
He always seemed the same.
On the day of my appointments, I'd just come in...
...sit in the chair and he'd get to work.
...and this happened every six months.
Like clockwork.
Then, a month ago...
...I rang up to book my regular appointment and there was this voice message...
...followed by a reference to a different dentist.
I didn't think anything of it.
I thought maybe he was on a holiday?
I'd seen a picture of him...
...standing on top of some ruins in Mexico.
Where had I seen that photograph?
Anyway.
A short time later we got the news...
...that he had killed himself.
And later on, it was revealed that he had been up to a lot of...
...well...unsavoury things.
One evening he was one the evening news.
Strange seeing such a familiar face being broadcast directly into your living room.
Deviant sex, drugs and fraud.
And the sex stuff...my god!
It was all really....weird stuff.
Compulsive.
The subsequent newspaper and the TV reports really only implied what had happened.
To some of the other patients...
....to the people he met online.
In the very office where I got my teeth cleaned.
From this information you could easily connect the dots.
S&M.
Laughing gas.
A modern day Marquis De Sade.
The dental hygienist was involved as well.
She had seemed like such a nice girl.
Bubbly.
Happy.
She was Scandinavian I believe.
As the story slowly unfolded over time...
...there was footage of this same girl...
...at the inquest...
...in expensive sunglasses...
...pushing through the media swarm gathered outside the police station in the CBD.
They chased her down the street like a pack of mongrel dogs.
She claimed she was manipulated...
...that she had been under the sway of the dentist...
...a charismatic and highly persuasive individual.
Charismatic and persuasive?
My dentist?
I just couldn't see it.
But apparently he was.
At the end of the day...
...what do you really know about somebody?
And I truely believe that your business is your business.
Just as my business is my business.
People have a right to privacy.
Nothing wrong with that.
But these two freaks....?
...the dentist and his assistance...
...what they did...
....my god.
and I'm no prude.
Like I say, do what you want...
...within reason.
But my dentist was into everything.
All taboos were broken.
Or so I'm led to believe.
You don't want to dig too deep...
...they say your search history is sold to the highest bidder.
They say we are all beholden to five or six big corporations.
That all our data is being complied somewhere...
...stored up.
Maybe this irrational but...you begin to fear a moral reckoning.
You have to be careful.
Anyway, it was the missing money....
...that was the thing that initially caught the government's attention.
He'd been fleecing his patients and his partner in different ways.
The drugs and the sexual practices came to light because of that inquiry.
The freaky sex stuff became the icing on the media cake.
He took the whole thing right up to the very edge...
...came to work everyday, a smile on his face, even when he was under investigation.
Even while the authorities were closing in on him.
And three of his female patients reported so-called immaculate conceptions.
Mysterious pregnancies.
Morning sickness.
He never put me under general anesthetic.
Thank goodness.
Hank, my husband, was livid.
I don't remember anything...untoward happening.
A reassuring pat on the shoulder from time to time, his face leaning into mine, telling me to spit in the little swirling bowl.
On the other hand, that guy had his hands in my mouth.
I think about that from time to time.
You bet I do.
The new dentist was older.
He had the same professional manor.
I took a blood test...
...for my own pease of mind.
I was fine...
There was nothing.
The story faded from the headlines.
Its funny how these things get consumed so quickly...
...then forgotten.
Life goes on.
Then we move onto the next thing.
I filled out the paperwork.
The new dentist was gruff...
...like he'd been doing this for too long.
I sat back in the chair and opened my mouth...
...he started probing around...
Then he said...
"Well...everything seems to be in order".
And that was it.
...did I just say priest?
I meant my dentist....
(...jesus, where did that come from?)
...anyway he killed himself the other day.
I don't mean to sound flippant about all this...
.....I mean, its a sad, terrible thing
...of course it is.
I read somewhere that, statistically speaking, a relatively higher percentage of dentists...
...you know...kill themselves....
...compared to other medical practitioners.
What is it about dentists?
Is it because they spend all day looking down into all those gaping mouths?
....all those teeth....
...is it really so bad?
Maybe it's seeing all those people squirm and grimace?
...jerking in pain...
...gripping the arm rest...
...white-knuckling it...
...terrified of those shiny implements
that little stainless steel sickle-shaped one is by far the worst. I hate that thing.
For me it's the high pitched sound of the drill...
...that is one of my least favourite sounds in the world.
Anyway, no one is happy to be in that chair...are they?
Certainly not me...
...for me, no matter how hard I brushed, eventually the drill came out.
English teeth.
In terms of suicide...you would think it would be the proctologists right?
...at the end of the biological process.
Anyway....
I couldn't put it together...
...why my dentist would do it.
At first it didn't seem to make sense.
At first.
He was a wiry guy...
...brisk but professional.
He was bald with thin hairy arms.
Basically, exactly what you'd expect a dentist to look and behave like.
And he had been my dentist for....
...well, ever since I moved to Sydney with my husband in 2005.
According to his family, there was no indication or warning signs.
And the same goes for me...
...in my limited capacity as one of his patients.
He always seemed the same.
On the day of my appointments, I'd just come in...
...sit in the chair and he'd get to work.
...and this happened every six months.
Like clockwork.
Then, a month ago...
...I rang up to book my regular appointment and there was this voice message...
...followed by a reference to a different dentist.
I didn't think anything of it.
I thought maybe he was on a holiday?
I'd seen a picture of him...
...standing on top of some ruins in Mexico.
Where had I seen that photograph?
Anyway.
A short time later we got the news...
...that he had killed himself.
And later on, it was revealed that he had been up to a lot of...
...well...unsavoury things.
One evening he was one the evening news.
Strange seeing such a familiar face being broadcast directly into your living room.
Deviant sex, drugs and fraud.
And the sex stuff...my god!
It was all really....weird stuff.
Compulsive.
The subsequent newspaper and the TV reports really only implied what had happened.
To some of the other patients...
....to the people he met online.
In the very office where I got my teeth cleaned.
From this information you could easily connect the dots.
S&M.
Laughing gas.
A modern day Marquis De Sade.
The dental hygienist was involved as well.
She had seemed like such a nice girl.
Bubbly.
Happy.
She was Scandinavian I believe.
As the story slowly unfolded over time...
...there was footage of this same girl...
...at the inquest...
...in expensive sunglasses...
...pushing through the media swarm gathered outside the police station in the CBD.
They chased her down the street like a pack of mongrel dogs.
She claimed she was manipulated...
...that she had been under the sway of the dentist...
...a charismatic and highly persuasive individual.
Charismatic and persuasive?
My dentist?
I just couldn't see it.
But apparently he was.
At the end of the day...
...what do you really know about somebody?
And I truely believe that your business is your business.
Just as my business is my business.
People have a right to privacy.
Nothing wrong with that.
But these two freaks....?
...the dentist and his assistance...
...what they did...
....my god.
and I'm no prude.
Like I say, do what you want...
...within reason.
But my dentist was into everything.
All taboos were broken.
Or so I'm led to believe.
You don't want to dig too deep...
...they say your search history is sold to the highest bidder.
They say we are all beholden to five or six big corporations.
That all our data is being complied somewhere...
...stored up.
Maybe this irrational but...you begin to fear a moral reckoning.
You have to be careful.
Anyway, it was the missing money....
...that was the thing that initially caught the government's attention.
He'd been fleecing his patients and his partner in different ways.
The drugs and the sexual practices came to light because of that inquiry.
The freaky sex stuff became the icing on the media cake.
He took the whole thing right up to the very edge...
...came to work everyday, a smile on his face, even when he was under investigation.
Even while the authorities were closing in on him.
And three of his female patients reported so-called immaculate conceptions.
Mysterious pregnancies.
Morning sickness.
He never put me under general anesthetic.
Thank goodness.
Hank, my husband, was livid.
I don't remember anything...untoward happening.
A reassuring pat on the shoulder from time to time, his face leaning into mine, telling me to spit in the little swirling bowl.
On the other hand, that guy had his hands in my mouth.
I think about that from time to time.
You bet I do.
The new dentist was older.
He had the same professional manor.
I took a blood test...
...for my own pease of mind.
I was fine...
There was nothing.
The story faded from the headlines.
Its funny how these things get consumed so quickly...
...then forgotten.
Life goes on.
Then we move onto the next thing.
I filled out the paperwork.
The new dentist was gruff...
...like he'd been doing this for too long.
I sat back in the chair and opened my mouth...
...he started probing around...
Then he said...
"Well...everything seems to be in order".
And that was it.
Wednesday, 19 April 2017
Old world tailoring
One morning I found a suitcase dumped on my front lawn. A blue Samsonite hard shell model with little plastic wheels (one of which was broken). It was lightly scuffed up and had no name tag. An abandoned piece of luggage jarring the predictable view from my living room window.
I picked it up and wheeled it into my garage.
I wasn't sure what else I was supposed to do with it. (Leave it? That didn't seem right. Call somebody? Okay...but who?)
Later, after work, I opened a beer, placed the bottle cap into the coffee tin and I noticed the suitcase once again (I'd completely forgotten about it in the accelerated rush of the day).
And it occurred to me there might be something dangerous inside this thing.
A bomb, a snake, drugs...
Of course then I had to laugh at myself.
What kind of spy novel was I living in that these items would arrive on my front door?
Jesus.
I popped the lock open with a screwdriver and I took a look inside.
The suitcase contained a men's suit.
The suit was in immaculate condition, dark blue, hand-stitched, lined with beautiful material. A three piece suit. None of that natty, swinging 60s bullshit. The pinched and short style that is so popular at the moment.
(Popular and inappropriately tight on older guys such as myself who tend to look like sad, clapped out Italian gigolo wannabes).
This suit was old school tailoring with a generous cut and attention to detail.
It was well-constructed, old world quality.
Anyway, that was it, just the suit, which I hung up in the garage with some of my other clothes.
Through the doorway which led into the kitchen, I could hear my wife Helen talking to her sister on the phone.
It was the usual deformation of other family member's.
A revolving carlcel criticism.
I couldn't hear my daughters which could mean any number of things.
Helen, my wife, was currently accusing me of being an emotionally absent father and husband.
This was her latest thing.
My position was, I give you money, this house, an annual holiday to whatever hot country you and the girls want to visit plus a visit to your mother's in Queensland once a year. Plus all the other incidentals. Plus Helen has the opportunity to study this year. To 'grow'. What was this month? She wanted to become 'a healer' with all the incurred homeopathic lifestyle jargon. And you know those courses aren't cheap.
All I ask is that I have the garage as my space and the opportunity to relax in my own way, in the cracks so to speak, in the spaces between the demands of my incredibly stressful job.
That didn't seem like too much of an ask, correct?
Anyway, currently, this was the main sticking point in our arguments.
The issue that had been popping up again and again.
The emotional separation.
The compartmentalisation.
The same thing my father was accused of when he was my age.
Closing off.
Shutting down.
I can almost understand it now.
And lately? Lately she has been accusing me of being on the spectrum.
Please.
Anyway, the garage is my zone because the inside of my house is too chaotic.
What with the fucking Lego and toys everywhere? Are you kidding?
Every moment feels like you are teetered on the edge of domestic chaos.
(Every time she goes out, I get this knot in my stomach because I know she is going to come back with more stuff from the shopping centre, the outlets, the supermarkets that charge twice as much as the less prestigious one.)
And look, if I'm being honest, the whole thing, between me and Helen has become a bit of a show.
For her parents and for mine.
(Mainly her parents because they have the money. The dangling carrot).
Emotionally speaking, I honestly feel like I have done everything I can with Helen. And vice-versa. We have exhausted all the feeling. All the emotion. We have had the kids, bought this house in this suburb I would have never chosen to live in, explored all topics of conversation including our fleeting dreams and desires, gone over every square millimetre of each other's bodies, personalities and psyches with a magnifying glass. Done. Finished. Kaput. No stone has been left unturned.
The point is...in my experience, well, people are not inexhaustible mysteries.
I could delude myself.
I could escape into the illusory safety of nostalgia.
I could soften my brain with Sting's greatest hits.
I could expedite my demise with increased alcohol consumption and saturated fats.
Jump back eighteen years ago and it was Helen or Diana.
Helen and Diana was a fork in the road situation, I suppose.
I liked Diana but Helen was the right move.
Long term prospects, I'm talking about here. The dangling carrot.
I'm still in contact with Diana but that ship has sailed.
We serve up carefully vetted versions of ourselves on Facebook (....even this kind of bitter self-realisation becomes trite doesn't it? Another condoned response to the gentle rust of discontent. A vent to let of steam, an attitude learnt from popular movies and music. Something to think about when you're standing out in the back garden, wondering what the stars look like beyond the light pollution...)
Besides, she has changed and I can tell it would have probably been the same with her.
There might have been a few more years of interest but ultimately.....
well...so much for the romanticism of inexhaustible mysteries.
Besides, I'm not about to fuck up my life by running off to explore some missed opportunity.
We become these stereotypes. Stereotype of conformity or middle aged acting up.You go through your twenties and your thirties and you move at neck-break speed into these roles and you can't go back.
You can't.
You can try (Please, be my guest).
My friend tried to make it to the other side of the lava flow, totally ballsed it up and now everyone hates him.
His wife, his kids, all their mutual friends all hate him. (He became the village pariah. Is that a thing? Or do villages only have idiots?)
Anyway, it all turned into a real mess.
And he did all this for the love of a shallow 32-year-old nitwit who ended up hating him anyway.
So I know, from secondhand experience, that course of action is ill-advised.
"You don't shit where you live".
That's what my old man said to me (one of his stock standard pieces of advice).
But the suitcase....the suit.
I wish there was something else....like a note in the pocket.
A phone number on a scrap of paper.
A lottery ticket.
Some sort of deeper mystery.
There wasn't.
That weekend, I go to visit this friend of mine, the one who balled it all up and became a sad sack.
I have a few beers with him.
He was free (he's always free now).
He puts on a brave face but his good humour always falters. He knows that I know that he really messed it up.
His secret life became his real life and guess what? It wasn't any good.
It was shit.
Sitting in his earth tone, under decorated one bedroom apartment, we talk and catch up, while sharing a four pack of Heineken.
Through the sliding glass balcony doors you can see identical lonely balconies.
A self-satisfied cluster of apartments, a concrete hive, conveniently located near the train station and the airport.
One morning I found a suitcase dumped on my front lawn. A blue Samsonite hard shell model with little plastic wheels (one of which was broken). It was lightly scuffed up and had no name tag. An abandoned piece of luggage jarring the predictable view from my living room window.
I got the suit dry-cleaned down the road at the shopping centre.
It fit me like a glove (I wasn't prone to wearing secondhand clothing but the suit was in very good condition).
And it felt good.
And look, even though it exceeded the dress code at work, I started wearing it.
Later that week, I got hit on by a rep.
(I hadn't been hit on by anyone in....three years).
All the supposedly fixed ideas and firm resolutions I had about being stoically faithful to my wife and taking the high road.....
...well, all that went straight out the window the moment the rep placed her hand my thigh in the pub near the office.
Yeah, I took a chance.
(Yeah right......I say this like I actually wrestled over this decision and made a carefully weighed choice. Who am I kidding? I was straight in there, just like an overheated high school kid).
She was staying in the hotel across the street.
The sex was good. It was fine.
Better than good.
Whatever.
We both got what we wanted.
Fifty minutes later we were both showered, dressed and parting ways on the street corner...
(me heading home, her to the airport in an uber) ...just two ordinary work colleagues moving back towards the mutually safe interiors of their respective lives.
As if nothing had happened.
And as far as I was concerned, there was no biblical reckoning.
No great punishment.
No karma activated payback.
I simply rejoined the prescribed flow of things and went about my business, both private and professional.
In fact, after that my life actually became easier in a number of different ways.
Of course, rationally speaking, this had nothing at all to do with this suit.
Having said all this, it became apparent to me that there was a sharp delineation in my luck, a predictable factor which defined when I was successful with opposite sex and when I wasn't. And that point of of delineation was the suit. There was no avoiding this.
Suit on: the ladies took notice like I was fucking Sean Connery.
Suit off: just another schlep hanging out by the photocopier.
Would I would be overstating the relevance of the suit to say it had magical properties?
Maybe.
There was something about it.
The suit shaped me.
Brought me into focus.
When this realisation took hold, I took a long looked at myself in the mirror.
I was in my early fifties and I realised this was it. Most likely last window of opportunity.
It gets you thinking about luck and lucky objects.
How maybe something like a coin, a rabbit's foot....or maybe even a suit could be imbued with luck.
You start to wonder if the suit's power extends beyond your sexual appeal.
Like I say, when I wore that suit I felt more confident, more sharply defined as a person, stronger and more in command of the different situations I found myself in.
More capable of dealing with the people and circumstances which ran counter it to my own needs and objectives.
Non-suit days were drab, tiring, underwhelming and generally unfulfilling. I'd arrive at the end of these days feeling slightly ripped off and anxious. There wasn't any one thing you could put your finger on, just a lot of little problems that seemed to pile up and get in the way. Like you were wading through a sewer pipe as opposed to ice skating across an alpine lake.
Suit wearing days were different.
Suit wearing days meant that I was the best possible version of myself.
Suit days and non-suit days.
What would you choose?
Anyway, the female attention was undeniable. And flattering.
I didn't go off the deep end.
I maintained the stoic married man act to remove as much doubt as possible.
And I had new rules; no social media.
No texting.
No emails.
No bragging to the boys.
Compartmentalisation all the way.
In this way, I was two separately defined people.
In terms of the logistics...
...what was the odd lost afternoon hour here and there?
Apart from the physical act which of course boosted the ego, what I valued was the fact that you could be the person you were before your adult life happened to you.
Before it defined you.
My only rule with these women (there were six that year) was that they commit to non commitment.
That they understand the true nature of the thing.
This was casual sex. Nothing more.
A contained moment.
It wasn't going to spill out into our lives like an oil slick killing all the wildlife.
It wasn't going to poison the environment.
With your wonky haircuts, your ill-advised fashion choices, your extra weight and your un-whitened teeth...there are phases in your life when you will look absolutely terrible.
For me, this wasn't one of those moments.
The suit pulled everything together.
Beyond the mechanics of sex, I liked the emotional intensity.
In relatively short space of time, in those hotel rooms, with six separate women, I could be objective and honest.
I liked that confessional mode.
Two people peeled out of their clothing, in naked afternoon moments, traffic noise drifting up from the street below, for that short but intense period of time.
Made all the sweeter for the compression.
The two of us momentarily released from that life occurring outside the room.
That life which was fixing you in place like fast-drying concrete.
To say it was always like this, free and liberating, would be a bit of a stretch.
One or two of these afternoon liaisons were briefly marred by guilt, momentarily bogged down, but overall there was nothing too off-putting.
I played it by ear. I saw a few of these women more than once.
Their reasons for being in that room?
1. Janet's husband talked too much but had nothing to say.
2. Fiona was happy with her husband but the problem was he was basically gay. Trapped in the closet by his traditional values family.
3. Gillian's was estranged from her husband. She had tourniqueted him off because she was angry with him for a lot of petty things which collectively had come to overwhelm her. And she despised herself for perpetuating this slow erosion of their relationship.
4. Kim's ongoing medical issues had made her husband emotionally ambivalent towards her.
5. Heather's husband had left her with the kids. She'd tried online dating but found that she seemed to attract freaks.
6. Loraine was happily married but she wanted to have some fun. Simple as that.
Anyway, all that happened in 2007.
About midway through 2008, all that suit mojo began to dry up.
It was like the window was slowly being closed.
It was as if the suit had lost its magnetic pull.
I still wore it but stopped expecting the same quota of luck.
One morning I found a suitcase dumped on my front lawn. A blue Samsonite hard shell model with little plastic wheels (one of which was broken). It was lightly scuffed up and had no name tag. An abandoned piece of luggage jarring the predictable view from my living room window.
These people....
They had one of those extra strength security screens on the windows and doors of their home. I don't know about the timing but they had done it the week we had moved in.
I could just about see the woman peering out through the mesh.
Once again I got the sense that our neighbours, like everyone else on our street, preferred to live in this closed off, completely fortified way.
Undoubtedly, in terms of streets to live on, we'd picked a dud.
I'd drive two or three streets over and there were kids playing on that street. Like I used to when I was a kid, kicking a ball around until sunset.
And in my imagination at least, there seemed to be an inordinately high number of well adjusted people pulling up in their cars, carrying their groceries inside, walking well-adjusted pets, waving to each other...
My street?
Not so much.
Hermits.
A student druggie house down the block, old cars crash-parked all over the dead lawn.
We'd offended our immediate neighbours, that much was obvious.
And I'd tried to mend the damage, build a bridge.
The damage that my noisy children inflicted on a daily basis.
That I had inflicted.
If I'm being honest, the problem, the real problem, was their little dog liked to yap at everything. Shadows. Rustling leaves. And one Saturday morning I'd crept out the backdoor, leant over the ribbed asbestos fence and shot that dog in the face with my daughter's orange water pistol.
Just to shut it up.
And the wife saw me doing this (what kind of person stands at a window, watching her little dog yap, yap, yap at 5:35 am on a Saturday morning?)
Anyway that was it.
Anyway, on the day I found the suitcase, I could just about make out her face through the mesh, a pale oval with a hard line scowl and two dots for eyes.
Is this your suitcase? I asked.
No, she said.
And closed the door cutting off my explanation.
One morning I found a suitcase dumped on my front lawn. A blue Samsonite hard shell model with little plastic wheels (one of which was broken). It was lightly scuffed up and had no name tag. An abandoned piece of luggage jarring the predictable view from my living room window.
Protected and emboldened by the suit, I got so confident that I decided to strike out on my own.
I was interested in personal security.
I'd been kicking around the idea for sometime.
I saw a great deal of opportunity there.
The more insular people became...
...the more paranoid
...the more they wanted this kind of high-end, personalised service.
The core business would focus on IT security....
...one of those collaborative economy set ups....
...later branching out into other forms of security.
I worked with independent contractors.
I was good at getting people onboard, creating the right vibe.
I mean...we're not as paranoid and fucked up as Americans...
....not yet...
...but we're getting there.
I'd loved in or around the city my entire life...
...moving to the suburbs was....
....wow...
...an education in human nature.
The suburbs were gold for me.
I realised that the isolation tended to breed the kind of fear that might be pay dirt for my company.
To get started, I got a storage unit out by the airport.
A place I could concentrate.
A unit at a reasonable monthly rate. About the size of a small garage.
To begin with I ran the business out of there.
I didn't mind the utilitarian concrete floors and tin walls. The landing planes scraping overhead.
The manager of the storage facility didn't mind me being there, as long as I paid a little extra. Everything was done online so in terms of appearances, it didn't matter I had no office.
I set up a desk, a rug, a filing cabinet and a few chairs. That was it.
I had some university guys, all wearing the same company t-shirts I'd had printed up, doing house calls.
I developed a catalogue containing a range of IT and personal safety items.
Products not strictly allowed in this country. Pepper sprays, a range of concealed brass knuckles, telescopic nightsticks....etc. The kind of stuff people like to have but probably would use.
And all that went well for a little while.
But the women?
What did I say before about rules and no consequences?
That didn't quite pan out the way I had expected.
Funnily enough, it was number 6.
Loraine.
As the power of the suit began to wear off....as the window started closing....I started breaking my own personal rules.
I went back to Loraine, the happy-go-lucky party girl, one too many times.
And don't get me wrong.
She was no femme fatal.
This was all my doing.
I wanted to maintain the afternoon feeling. The buzz.
I needed that boost of confidence while I was venturing out on my own, starting my new business.
Shuttle ahead five years and I can see now the suit is part of a larger pattern.
A larger pattern of bad luck.
And although Loraine wasn't an intentional femme fatal, she still possessed all kinds of dark and destructive craziness.
She was a smiling train wreck.
Anyway, it came to light and Helen left me.
No therapy or attempts at reconciliation.
She was straight out the door.
It was a shock because the narrative usually involves some attempt at painful reconciliation.
Not Helen. She was gone. A child under each arm. Speak to my lawyer.
I can't blame her.
Eventually, the house was also taken away.
The kids were transformed into Helen's angry little mouthpieces.
The money tightened up to the point of strangulation.
I was basically embezzling from myself to keep afloat what with the lawyers emailing me every five minutes.
What do they say?
What is that expression: stealing from Peter to pay Paul?
It was like that.
Anyway, time slowly reveals these things much like the tide pulling back the ocean exposes diving hazards.
And like I say, there was a larger pattern of bad luck.
I can see that now...
...how every time I wore the suit, it contributed to the deterioration of things.
Weddings went septic.
Christenings as well.
The business tanked.
Funerals and the subsequent reading of the will that didn't bear the fruits we'd hoped for.
I'm not even a superstitious person but there you have it.
That's what happened.
You get sucked into these things.
I'm not saying that every time I put that suit on something went wrong. That would be crazy.
I am just talking about accumulative properties. The patterns we unconsciously fall into.
The difference between short term and long term luck.
It was that sort of thing.
The general pattern.
Something you can only see later on.
One morning I found a suitcase dumped on my front lawn. A blue Samsonite hard shell model with little plastic wheels (one of which was broken). It was lightly scuffed up and had no name tag. An abandoned piece of luggage jarring the predictable view from my living room window.
Some guy's suit was inside.
I picked it up and wheeled it into my garage.
I wasn't sure what else I was supposed to do with it. (Leave it? That didn't seem right. Call somebody? Okay...but who?)
Later, after work, I opened a beer, placed the bottle cap into the coffee tin and I noticed the suitcase once again (I'd completely forgotten about it in the accelerated rush of the day).
And it occurred to me there might be something dangerous inside this thing.
A bomb, a snake, drugs...
Of course then I had to laugh at myself.
What kind of spy novel was I living in that these items would arrive on my front door?
Jesus.
I popped the lock open with a screwdriver and I took a look inside.
The suitcase contained a men's suit.
The suit was in immaculate condition, dark blue, hand-stitched, lined with beautiful material. A three piece suit. None of that natty, swinging 60s bullshit. The pinched and short style that is so popular at the moment.
(Popular and inappropriately tight on older guys such as myself who tend to look like sad, clapped out Italian gigolo wannabes).
This suit was old school tailoring with a generous cut and attention to detail.
It was well-constructed, old world quality.
Anyway, that was it, just the suit, which I hung up in the garage with some of my other clothes.
Through the doorway which led into the kitchen, I could hear my wife Helen talking to her sister on the phone.
It was the usual deformation of other family member's.
A revolving carlcel criticism.
I couldn't hear my daughters which could mean any number of things.
Helen, my wife, was currently accusing me of being an emotionally absent father and husband.
This was her latest thing.
My position was, I give you money, this house, an annual holiday to whatever hot country you and the girls want to visit plus a visit to your mother's in Queensland once a year. Plus all the other incidentals. Plus Helen has the opportunity to study this year. To 'grow'. What was this month? She wanted to become 'a healer' with all the incurred homeopathic lifestyle jargon. And you know those courses aren't cheap.
All I ask is that I have the garage as my space and the opportunity to relax in my own way, in the cracks so to speak, in the spaces between the demands of my incredibly stressful job.
That didn't seem like too much of an ask, correct?
Anyway, currently, this was the main sticking point in our arguments.
The issue that had been popping up again and again.
The emotional separation.
The compartmentalisation.
The same thing my father was accused of when he was my age.
Closing off.
Shutting down.
I can almost understand it now.
And lately? Lately she has been accusing me of being on the spectrum.
Please.
Anyway, the garage is my zone because the inside of my house is too chaotic.
What with the fucking Lego and toys everywhere? Are you kidding?
Every moment feels like you are teetered on the edge of domestic chaos.
(Every time she goes out, I get this knot in my stomach because I know she is going to come back with more stuff from the shopping centre, the outlets, the supermarkets that charge twice as much as the less prestigious one.)
And look, if I'm being honest, the whole thing, between me and Helen has become a bit of a show.
For her parents and for mine.
(Mainly her parents because they have the money. The dangling carrot).
Emotionally speaking, I honestly feel like I have done everything I can with Helen. And vice-versa. We have exhausted all the feeling. All the emotion. We have had the kids, bought this house in this suburb I would have never chosen to live in, explored all topics of conversation including our fleeting dreams and desires, gone over every square millimetre of each other's bodies, personalities and psyches with a magnifying glass. Done. Finished. Kaput. No stone has been left unturned.
The point is...in my experience, well, people are not inexhaustible mysteries.
I could delude myself.
I could escape into the illusory safety of nostalgia.
I could soften my brain with Sting's greatest hits.
I could expedite my demise with increased alcohol consumption and saturated fats.
Jump back eighteen years ago and it was Helen or Diana.
Helen and Diana was a fork in the road situation, I suppose.
I liked Diana but Helen was the right move.
Long term prospects, I'm talking about here. The dangling carrot.
I'm still in contact with Diana but that ship has sailed.
We serve up carefully vetted versions of ourselves on Facebook (....even this kind of bitter self-realisation becomes trite doesn't it? Another condoned response to the gentle rust of discontent. A vent to let of steam, an attitude learnt from popular movies and music. Something to think about when you're standing out in the back garden, wondering what the stars look like beyond the light pollution...)
Besides, she has changed and I can tell it would have probably been the same with her.
There might have been a few more years of interest but ultimately.....
well...so much for the romanticism of inexhaustible mysteries.
Besides, I'm not about to fuck up my life by running off to explore some missed opportunity.
We become these stereotypes. Stereotype of conformity or middle aged acting up.You go through your twenties and your thirties and you move at neck-break speed into these roles and you can't go back.
You can't.
You can try (Please, be my guest).
My friend tried to make it to the other side of the lava flow, totally ballsed it up and now everyone hates him.
His wife, his kids, all their mutual friends all hate him. (He became the village pariah. Is that a thing? Or do villages only have idiots?)
Anyway, it all turned into a real mess.
And he did all this for the love of a shallow 32-year-old nitwit who ended up hating him anyway.
So I know, from secondhand experience, that course of action is ill-advised.
"You don't shit where you live".
That's what my old man said to me (one of his stock standard pieces of advice).
But the suitcase....the suit.
I wish there was something else....like a note in the pocket.
A phone number on a scrap of paper.
A lottery ticket.
Some sort of deeper mystery.
There wasn't.
That weekend, I go to visit this friend of mine, the one who balled it all up and became a sad sack.
I have a few beers with him.
He was free (he's always free now).
He puts on a brave face but his good humour always falters. He knows that I know that he really messed it up.
His secret life became his real life and guess what? It wasn't any good.
It was shit.
Sitting in his earth tone, under decorated one bedroom apartment, we talk and catch up, while sharing a four pack of Heineken.
Through the sliding glass balcony doors you can see identical lonely balconies.
A self-satisfied cluster of apartments, a concrete hive, conveniently located near the train station and the airport.
One morning I found a suitcase dumped on my front lawn. A blue Samsonite hard shell model with little plastic wheels (one of which was broken). It was lightly scuffed up and had no name tag. An abandoned piece of luggage jarring the predictable view from my living room window.
I got the suit dry-cleaned down the road at the shopping centre.
It fit me like a glove (I wasn't prone to wearing secondhand clothing but the suit was in very good condition).
And it felt good.
And look, even though it exceeded the dress code at work, I started wearing it.
Later that week, I got hit on by a rep.
(I hadn't been hit on by anyone in....three years).
All the supposedly fixed ideas and firm resolutions I had about being stoically faithful to my wife and taking the high road.....
...well, all that went straight out the window the moment the rep placed her hand my thigh in the pub near the office.
Yeah, I took a chance.
(Yeah right......I say this like I actually wrestled over this decision and made a carefully weighed choice. Who am I kidding? I was straight in there, just like an overheated high school kid).
She was staying in the hotel across the street.
The sex was good. It was fine.
Better than good.
Whatever.
We both got what we wanted.
Fifty minutes later we were both showered, dressed and parting ways on the street corner...
(me heading home, her to the airport in an uber) ...just two ordinary work colleagues moving back towards the mutually safe interiors of their respective lives.
As if nothing had happened.
And as far as I was concerned, there was no biblical reckoning.
No great punishment.
No karma activated payback.
I simply rejoined the prescribed flow of things and went about my business, both private and professional.
In fact, after that my life actually became easier in a number of different ways.
Of course, rationally speaking, this had nothing at all to do with this suit.
Having said all this, it became apparent to me that there was a sharp delineation in my luck, a predictable factor which defined when I was successful with opposite sex and when I wasn't. And that point of of delineation was the suit. There was no avoiding this.
Suit on: the ladies took notice like I was fucking Sean Connery.
Suit off: just another schlep hanging out by the photocopier.
Would I would be overstating the relevance of the suit to say it had magical properties?
Maybe.
There was something about it.
The suit shaped me.
Brought me into focus.
When this realisation took hold, I took a long looked at myself in the mirror.
I was in my early fifties and I realised this was it. Most likely last window of opportunity.
It gets you thinking about luck and lucky objects.
How maybe something like a coin, a rabbit's foot....or maybe even a suit could be imbued with luck.
You start to wonder if the suit's power extends beyond your sexual appeal.
Like I say, when I wore that suit I felt more confident, more sharply defined as a person, stronger and more in command of the different situations I found myself in.
More capable of dealing with the people and circumstances which ran counter it to my own needs and objectives.
Non-suit days were drab, tiring, underwhelming and generally unfulfilling. I'd arrive at the end of these days feeling slightly ripped off and anxious. There wasn't any one thing you could put your finger on, just a lot of little problems that seemed to pile up and get in the way. Like you were wading through a sewer pipe as opposed to ice skating across an alpine lake.
Suit wearing days were different.
Suit wearing days meant that I was the best possible version of myself.
Suit days and non-suit days.
What would you choose?
Anyway, the female attention was undeniable. And flattering.
I didn't go off the deep end.
I maintained the stoic married man act to remove as much doubt as possible.
And I had new rules; no social media.
No texting.
No emails.
No bragging to the boys.
Compartmentalisation all the way.
In this way, I was two separately defined people.
In terms of the logistics...
...what was the odd lost afternoon hour here and there?
Apart from the physical act which of course boosted the ego, what I valued was the fact that you could be the person you were before your adult life happened to you.
Before it defined you.
My only rule with these women (there were six that year) was that they commit to non commitment.
That they understand the true nature of the thing.
This was casual sex. Nothing more.
A contained moment.
It wasn't going to spill out into our lives like an oil slick killing all the wildlife.
It wasn't going to poison the environment.
With your wonky haircuts, your ill-advised fashion choices, your extra weight and your un-whitened teeth...there are phases in your life when you will look absolutely terrible.
For me, this wasn't one of those moments.
The suit pulled everything together.
Beyond the mechanics of sex, I liked the emotional intensity.
In relatively short space of time, in those hotel rooms, with six separate women, I could be objective and honest.
I liked that confessional mode.
Two people peeled out of their clothing, in naked afternoon moments, traffic noise drifting up from the street below, for that short but intense period of time.
Made all the sweeter for the compression.
The two of us momentarily released from that life occurring outside the room.
That life which was fixing you in place like fast-drying concrete.
To say it was always like this, free and liberating, would be a bit of a stretch.
One or two of these afternoon liaisons were briefly marred by guilt, momentarily bogged down, but overall there was nothing too off-putting.
I played it by ear. I saw a few of these women more than once.
Their reasons for being in that room?
1. Janet's husband talked too much but had nothing to say.
2. Fiona was happy with her husband but the problem was he was basically gay. Trapped in the closet by his traditional values family.
3. Gillian's was estranged from her husband. She had tourniqueted him off because she was angry with him for a lot of petty things which collectively had come to overwhelm her. And she despised herself for perpetuating this slow erosion of their relationship.
4. Kim's ongoing medical issues had made her husband emotionally ambivalent towards her.
5. Heather's husband had left her with the kids. She'd tried online dating but found that she seemed to attract freaks.
6. Loraine was happily married but she wanted to have some fun. Simple as that.
Anyway, all that happened in 2007.
About midway through 2008, all that suit mojo began to dry up.
It was like the window was slowly being closed.
It was as if the suit had lost its magnetic pull.
I still wore it but stopped expecting the same quota of luck.
One morning I found a suitcase dumped on my front lawn. A blue Samsonite hard shell model with little plastic wheels (one of which was broken). It was lightly scuffed up and had no name tag. An abandoned piece of luggage jarring the predictable view from my living room window.
I went next door.
I wanted to asked them if the suitcase belonged to them.These people....
They had one of those extra strength security screens on the windows and doors of their home. I don't know about the timing but they had done it the week we had moved in.
I could just about see the woman peering out through the mesh.
Once again I got the sense that our neighbours, like everyone else on our street, preferred to live in this closed off, completely fortified way.
Undoubtedly, in terms of streets to live on, we'd picked a dud.
I'd drive two or three streets over and there were kids playing on that street. Like I used to when I was a kid, kicking a ball around until sunset.
And in my imagination at least, there seemed to be an inordinately high number of well adjusted people pulling up in their cars, carrying their groceries inside, walking well-adjusted pets, waving to each other...
My street?
Not so much.
Hermits.
A student druggie house down the block, old cars crash-parked all over the dead lawn.
We'd offended our immediate neighbours, that much was obvious.
And I'd tried to mend the damage, build a bridge.
The damage that my noisy children inflicted on a daily basis.
That I had inflicted.
If I'm being honest, the problem, the real problem, was their little dog liked to yap at everything. Shadows. Rustling leaves. And one Saturday morning I'd crept out the backdoor, leant over the ribbed asbestos fence and shot that dog in the face with my daughter's orange water pistol.
Just to shut it up.
And the wife saw me doing this (what kind of person stands at a window, watching her little dog yap, yap, yap at 5:35 am on a Saturday morning?)
Anyway that was it.
Anyway, on the day I found the suitcase, I could just about make out her face through the mesh, a pale oval with a hard line scowl and two dots for eyes.
Is this your suitcase? I asked.
No, she said.
And closed the door cutting off my explanation.
One morning I found a suitcase dumped on my front lawn. A blue Samsonite hard shell model with little plastic wheels (one of which was broken). It was lightly scuffed up and had no name tag. An abandoned piece of luggage jarring the predictable view from my living room window.
I don't know happened to the suitcase.
I must have thrown it away.
Eventually I got tired of the company I was working for.Protected and emboldened by the suit, I got so confident that I decided to strike out on my own.
I was interested in personal security.
I'd been kicking around the idea for sometime.
I saw a great deal of opportunity there.
The more insular people became...
...the more paranoid
...the more they wanted this kind of high-end, personalised service.
The core business would focus on IT security....
...one of those collaborative economy set ups....
...later branching out into other forms of security.
I worked with independent contractors.
I was good at getting people onboard, creating the right vibe.
I mean...we're not as paranoid and fucked up as Americans...
....not yet...
...but we're getting there.
I'd loved in or around the city my entire life...
...moving to the suburbs was....
....wow...
...an education in human nature.
The suburbs were gold for me.
I realised that the isolation tended to breed the kind of fear that might be pay dirt for my company.
To get started, I got a storage unit out by the airport.
A place I could concentrate.
A unit at a reasonable monthly rate. About the size of a small garage.
To begin with I ran the business out of there.
I didn't mind the utilitarian concrete floors and tin walls. The landing planes scraping overhead.
The manager of the storage facility didn't mind me being there, as long as I paid a little extra. Everything was done online so in terms of appearances, it didn't matter I had no office.
I set up a desk, a rug, a filing cabinet and a few chairs. That was it.
I had some university guys, all wearing the same company t-shirts I'd had printed up, doing house calls.
I developed a catalogue containing a range of IT and personal safety items.
Products not strictly allowed in this country. Pepper sprays, a range of concealed brass knuckles, telescopic nightsticks....etc. The kind of stuff people like to have but probably would use.
And all that went well for a little while.
But the women?
What did I say before about rules and no consequences?
That didn't quite pan out the way I had expected.
Funnily enough, it was number 6.
Loraine.
As the power of the suit began to wear off....as the window started closing....I started breaking my own personal rules.
I went back to Loraine, the happy-go-lucky party girl, one too many times.
And don't get me wrong.
She was no femme fatal.
This was all my doing.
I wanted to maintain the afternoon feeling. The buzz.
I needed that boost of confidence while I was venturing out on my own, starting my new business.
Shuttle ahead five years and I can see now the suit is part of a larger pattern.
A larger pattern of bad luck.
And although Loraine wasn't an intentional femme fatal, she still possessed all kinds of dark and destructive craziness.
She was a smiling train wreck.
Anyway, it came to light and Helen left me.
No therapy or attempts at reconciliation.
She was straight out the door.
It was a shock because the narrative usually involves some attempt at painful reconciliation.
Not Helen. She was gone. A child under each arm. Speak to my lawyer.
I can't blame her.
Eventually, the house was also taken away.
The kids were transformed into Helen's angry little mouthpieces.
The money tightened up to the point of strangulation.
I was basically embezzling from myself to keep afloat what with the lawyers emailing me every five minutes.
What do they say?
What is that expression: stealing from Peter to pay Paul?
It was like that.
Anyway, time slowly reveals these things much like the tide pulling back the ocean exposes diving hazards.
And like I say, there was a larger pattern of bad luck.
I can see that now...
...how every time I wore the suit, it contributed to the deterioration of things.
Weddings went septic.
Christenings as well.
The business tanked.
Funerals and the subsequent reading of the will that didn't bear the fruits we'd hoped for.
I'm not even a superstitious person but there you have it.
That's what happened.
You get sucked into these things.
I'm not saying that every time I put that suit on something went wrong. That would be crazy.
I am just talking about accumulative properties. The patterns we unconsciously fall into.
The difference between short term and long term luck.
It was that sort of thing.
The general pattern.
Something you can only see later on.
One morning I found a suitcase dumped on my front lawn. A blue Samsonite hard shell model with little plastic wheels (one of which was broken). It was lightly scuffed up and had no name tag. An abandoned piece of luggage jarring the predictable view from my living room window.
Some guy's suit was inside.
I left it in the garage, hanging on a nail and my wife inadvertently took it, with all the rest of my stuff, to the dry-cleaners.
(I had no intension of doing this).
She must have thought I'd left it out for cleaning with the rest.
Anyway, a few days later she reminded me to pick it up, handing over the receipt.
The guy behind the counter took the receipt, rotated the carousel until my numbers came around, then handed over my items.
Very nice suit, he said.
Yeah, I said.
I drove home, parked, got the stuff out of the car and went inside.
I pulled the plastic off the suit.
I through about putting it on.
I had no intension of wearing someone else's clothing but I found myself doing it anyway.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)