nanowrimo
Saturday, 17 November 2012 - 9:26am
"Douglas! Come meet our new tenant!"
A large teddy bear of a man, cleaning the lenses of a pair of reading glasses on a corner of his cardigan, rounded the corner from the large living area at the far end of the hallway.
"Isn't he a handsome boy?" gushed Glenda proudly, as though assuming some responsibility for whatever comeliness was to be found there.
"Fine looking fellow," he concurred, smiling warmly. "Doug Henshaw. Pleased to meet you." He extended a hand, which Tim shook, detecting not a trace of macho over-firmness. "Let me show you to your digs."
What the estate agent had described as a granny flat, Tim would have described as a small house. It was situated halfway down a concrete path that ran the length of a huge back yard, and reminded him of the detached cottages in a caravan park where his family had stayed on one particularly rainy and generally ill-fated holiday. Except that it was nice. Overwhelmingly nice. Everything in the place had been procured and assembled with such a painstaking attention to niceness that he could only imagine that on completion, the person responsible had promptly committed suicide, their lifelong devotion to all things nice complete. "Good heavens! This is palatial! Are you sure you're charging enough?"
"Very kind of you to say so. We had it fixed up for my mother a few years ago. Only accumulating dust since. She passed away in intensive care; never got to stay a single night in the end."
"I'm sorry." And relieved. As a lifelong ardent sceptic, Tim knew he would otherwise be listening out for her ghost at night.
"Very satisfying the way the family came together for her. Lovely service, beautiful headstone."
Tim had been searching Doug's countenance for a trace of the mean streak that he'd been warned about, and concluded he'd find more lurking menace in a litter of labrador puppies. Both Doug and Glenda spoke with the slightly slurred diction of the stroke victim, the perpetually slightly drunk, or the very expensively educated. Tim guessed the third, and possibly the second. Still, the genial attitude was infectious, and he was beginning to feel very good indeed about his new situation.
"You can bring your car around the side when you're ready."
"That's okay," said Tim, heaving his bags onto his new double (queen sized?) bed, "I don't have a car."
"Ah! Might be able to help you there. I have a cousin in the trade. He should be able to sort you out with something reasonable."
"Don't have a license, in fact." Then, realising this may be interpreted as an admission of being a serial dangerous/drunk driver, he added "Never had one."
"Oh." Doug seemed genuinely flummoxed by this and unable to formulate a response. "Never mind," he said at last, "We're about to pop into town to run a few errands. I daresay you'll want to get settled in."
"Yes. I might go for a walk later. Thanks for the very kind welcome."
"Very pleased to have you. Good to finally get some use out of the old shed. Feel free to pop in whenever you need anything, or just for a natter. We keep a very open house. Truth be told, Glenda's often at a loose end since she retired, and a bit of conversation now and then will keep her from going completely ga-ga." He winked conspiratorially, and Tim couldn't help but smile.
"I'll do my best."
His new landlord departed with a cheery wave, leaving Tim to marvel at how yet again he'd managed to land on his feet. Tucking a few nagging threads of guilt into the back pockets of his mind, he lay on the bed, giving it an experimental bounce as he took in the details of his new home. His bed was at the far end of the cabin, beside a curtained window looking out onto the garden. Nice wardrobe at the end of the bed, with a nice but empty recess for a TV which he would fill in due course. Nice lounge, nice coffee table, nice kitchenette in the far corner with a very nice breakfast bar affair surrounded by nice stools. The door to what he assumed was a nice bathroom/laundry was mercifully closed. He would save that niceness for later. No point overdoing it.
After a nap, he would have a shower and amble down to what on his map was labelled "New Town Shopping Centre". Tim was very pleased to see the map had a picture of a half-full glass at one corner of the complex, which he took to denote some sort of pub. "Very nice," he mumbled to himself as he kicked off his shoes and drifted off to complete the previous night's sleep.
Tuesday, 6 November 2012 - 10:09pm
Tim knew that the type of vehicle he was in was known as a "ute", and was pretty certain that the bit he was in was the "cab", and that the bit behind him was probably called the "tray". He was disappointed that the tray wan't carrying bales of hay, crates of live chickens, and a dog or two. It had a big, manly, galvanised iron box containing either tools or human body parts, several coils of nylon rope and widgety metal things that presumably added value to the nylon rope, and Tim's bags.
The cab smelt like an ashtray. Much of it was an ashtray. Bent cigarette butts sprang like mushrooms from niches all around him. It was very early in the morning; he hadn't time to shower, and he really didn't like being out in public unwashed, with greasy hair.
"Where ya from?"
"Sydney."
"Sydney," echoed his driver, who Tim assumed was the landlord of the Railway Hotel at Tailors Creek, by virtue of the fact that he was probably the husband of the woman he assumed to be the landlady. That was in fact the case, and the man's name was Ken. Tim didn't know this because he had appalling social skills and hardly ever introduced himself, nor asked anybody their name.
For a while Ken looked as though he was trying to remember where he'd previously heard the unfamiliar word "Sydney", then said finally "You want to keep your back to the wall down there."
"Ah. Yes."
They crossed the highway, heading towards the coast, and Tim was very, very glad that he hadn't attempted to walk the distance. He'd clearly misjudged the scale of his map.
"Poofs," Ken added, by way of clarification.
"Mmm. Hasn't been a problem so far, but I'll bear it in mind." Then, realising he probably sounded a little supercilious, he thought he should socially reciprocate, in the form of "You lived here long?"
"Yep. Where you want to be dropped off?"
Tim knew the answer, but pulled the map out of his satchel anyway. "Nolan Place. I think it's the house at the end."
"Doug Henshaw's place?"
The name sounded familiar. Tim ferreted around in his satchel and retrieved another bit of paper. "Yes, that's it."
"You want to watch out for him."
"Back to the wall?"
Ken frowned. "No, nothing like that."
Tim noticed that the empty space on his map, which he had presumed to be native bushland or grazing land for ruminants, was in reality anything but empty. On both sides of the road was Colorbond™ corrugated steel fencing with an occasional gap for an entry road, or perhaps driveway. Behind the fences, he could see ceramic tiled roofs, crowned with aerials and satellite dishes. It was like a series of medieval walled towns in attractive designer colours.
"Doug's alright. You just don't want to get into his bad books." Barely slowing down, Ken gave the steering wheel a sudden twist, and they crossed the road into one of these gaps in the wall a split second before meeting a car coming the other way. "He can finish you."
Tim had no idea what was meant by that, or even whther he'd heard correctly, but he was excited that they were now into territory covered by his map. Tim liked maps. From this branch off the main road into town, all the streets flowered off into gently curving crescents or cul-de-sacs which on the map looked to Tim like the gaily coloured cross-sections of the human brain you see in New Scientist magazine.
There was something about the whole landscape here that was distinctly odd, but it was still quite early in the morning, and Tim couldn't put his finger on it.
Ken pulled on the hand brake at the end of one of these asphalt fronds, near the top of a hill, on the side of which stood a house significantly more grand than it's neighbours. It was multi-story, where everything around was resolutely California Bungalow, and it had a couple of quite old, tall trees in the front yard. Tim hadn't seen anything else that could be considered more than a sapling in any of the surrounding properties. Maybe that was what was odd.
"Thanks very much," said Tim, to a slow nod from Ken, who appeared focussed on something tremendously significant in a nearby rock garden. Tim fetched his bags from the back of the ute, and through the open passenger window called "Thanks again!"
"No worries mate." With a crunch of the gears, Ken Henshaw was off for his daily run into town.
At the top of a presumably charming garden path, lined with quite possibly tasteful native shrubs and grasses, Tim set down his rucksack and bin bag and rang the doorbell. The door was answered by an elegantly-dressed woman, possibly late fifties, more likely early sixties, who executed a well-practiced smile of greeting.
"Hello. Tim Curlis. Here for the granny flat."
"Ah. We were expecting you yesterday."
"Yes, sorry about that. Transport troubles."
"Never mind. Never mind." She beamed with appeared to be genuine bonhomie and stood aside. "Come in. Leave your bags there; I'll get Douglas to sort you out."
Tim crossed the threshold tentatively. "Thank you, er..."
"Oh, forgive me. Glenda. My heavens; what a handsome young man! What a handsome young man!"
Sunday, 4 November 2012 - 5:41pm
"Would all passengers wishing to alight at Tailors Creek please make your way to the rear door of Car D?"
Tim gathered up his satchel, a rather expensive rucksack (the legacy of an aborted plan to go backpacking around New Zealand), and a rather less expensive heavy-duty bin bag which he carried St. Nicholas fashion. He found he was the only passenger on this sparsely-populated train to want to get off at this stop, which worried him slightly.
He was worried further when Tailors Creek railway station turned out to be a one-carriage-long platform with a small boarded-up ticket booth bearing a sign saying that as of 1st July 1990, all tickets could be purchased from the nearest Countrylink office in Port Dalston. The signs along the platform said "Alight here for Port Dalston", but there was no bus stop or other evidence of public transport to be seen; just a deserted little carpark. Across the road was a small weatherboard shop bearing a sign advertising, in letters of decreasing size, like an optometrists' test chart, "Post Office, Sub-Newsagent, Bread, Milk, Fishing Tackle, Bait, Licenses...", and another sign on the door saying "CLOSED". To one side of that versatile establishment was one of those quaint cafés that appear to have been embroidered rather than built, also closed, and on the other - Lennon be praised! - was the Railway Hotel. It didn't look the most enticing place, but it was civilisation of a sort.
As he pushed open the door, the pub extruded a perfectly door-shaped beam of tobacco smoke that eventually flattened and thinned as it snaked into the street. Once his eyes and nose had adjusted to the smoky interior, neither organ found themselves glad of the additional clarity. The tobacco smell had temporarily masked a variety of more horrible odours. Stale sweat and stale beer were easily identifiable to the layperson, but the possible source of others were horribly mysterious. The connoisseur of offensive smells might close their eyes, flare their nostrils, purse their lips, knot their brow, and declare "Hmm. Yes. I'm picking up notes of dirty washing basket and mouldy drain, but carrying through is the unmistakeable zest of half a tin of dog food left out in the sun for three days, with a crisp, formaldehyde finish."
Nor was the decor the cliched rustic country pub interior he was expecting. Instead he guessed the furniture, fixtures, and fittings were cannibalised from half a dozen qualitatively wildly different but equally tacky suburban pubs. Formica, cane, leather, and wrought iron all jostled gaudily for attention, which had the virtue of providing a distraction from the patrons, all of whom had apparently just finished a hard day's work modelling for one of Hogarth's more scabrous cartoons.
Tim wondered why the impossibly old man rolling a cigarette at the bar was wearing his "I ♥ NY" singlet over the top of a loose, dark brown skivvy, then realised that it wasn't a skivvy; it was his skin.
At least the ruddy, cherubic landlady met expectations. He approached the bar with what he calculated to be a winning smile. "Hello. I've just got off the train, and was wondering when the next bus into town was due."
The impossibly old man chortled evilly. Or perhaps coughed.
"Only bus comes out here is the school bus," she drawled, in the Australian Film Industry approved manner. "I could call for a taxi, but at this time of night he'd want to be paid for the trip out as well."
Tim looked at his watch. It wasn't yet six o'clock. It was still broad daylight outside. "Is that legal?"
"They do it," she said severely. Then her mood brightened, "Tell you what: I could let you have one of our rooms upstairs. Just been renovated. For a nice young man like you, say thirty-five bucks. My husband's going into town in the morning; he can give you a lift. A lot cheaper than the taxi, and you can drink the difference."
Not the most subtle sales pitch, but he was less inclined to trust taxi drivers. A couple of experiences, when Tim was in need of transport but lacking the fare, had shown them to be a lot more agile than their physique would lead you to believe. To his mind this constituted a deliberately deceptive trade practice. On this occasion he had the money, but it was part of a lump sum intended to see him through the next six to twelve months, so he was keen to start as frugally as he meant to continue.
Tim had earlier thought that the distance was walkable, at least according to his well-studied photocopy of a relatively current map, but now burdened with a bulging backpack and garbage bag, in weather which despite being a good few months into the year was still, to use the meteorological jargon, "fucking hot", he decided not to risk it.
The room was perfectly serviceable, and the smell didn't seem so bad upstairs. However when he returned downstairs he found the smell didn't seem as bad there now, and was quite content with an evening meal of four or five or six beers, some chips and nuts. He made his way through a pile of newspaper, avoided eye contact and was delighted to find the compliment returned.
The Australian inclination against intellectualism fits very neatly with a taciturn nature. If you are going to bore me as much as I know I am going to bore you, and for that matter as much as I bore myself, it would be better for both of us to not converse at all.
Tim wasn't sure about the bedsheets, which had the sheen and rigidity of butchers' paper, and didn't look at all comfortable. That and the fact that he was a bit pissed convinced him to sleep on top of them, more or less fully clothed. He was glad of that when he was woken at dawn by a hammering on the door and a male voice crying "She said you wanted a lift into town!"
Saturday, 3 November 2012 - 4:48pm
It was early 1992, and the most important issue in the world was the recent sacking of charismatic London Irish punk icon Shane MacGowan by his band, the Pogues. Actually, in the grand scheme of things, this was probably one of the more insignificant events, but it was what Tim Curlis chose to obsess about in order to keep other, less comfortable thoughts at bay. On his northbound country train he pored through the NME, enthusiastically imbibing the celebration of the limitless artistic potential of raggle-taggle and Madchester, and cursing pale, lanky, earnest wall-of-distortion shoe-gazers and Fucking Nick Kent, with a savage determination to ignore the real personal significance of this day.
As the view from his window changed from the sandstone and eucalyptus of the Sydney basin to the hills of the Hunter Valley - as rolling and green as hills come - he distracted himself further with a sausage roll from the dining car and some Interesting Facts from the New Scientist magazine purchased at Central station that morning. Apparently dogs may avoid lung cancer from passive smoking due to the remarkably effective air filtration bestowed by their long snouts. Seems only fair. Hard luck for the Pekingese, though.
The train swung from side to side in long, lazy arcs around the aforementioned hills until at last it appeared to tire of such exuberant frivolity, and settled down to the serious business of plowing straight through the swamps and occasional granite cutting that signalled it's entry to the north coast of New South Wales. By this time Tim had consumed a curried egg sandwich, a packet of chips and another sausage roll. He'd read a handful of pages of each of three books and a couple of magazines. He'd mused about the possible evolutionary advantages of asexual reproduction. He'd noticed that all the trees in the fields looked as though they'd been uniformly trimmed from underneath by some very sophisticated machinery to exactly the maximum height attainable by the mouths of the animals grazing there. He'd raised and lowered his footrest countless times and ultimately judged it to be of dubious utility. He'd rummaged through the dozen or so audio cassettes in his satchel, selected one, used a biro to wind the spools tight so as not to have the machine mangle the tape and, thus prepared, he fed it to his walkman, which consumed it with a satisfying snap.
Billy Connolly once ventured that to the Queen, the world must smell like fresh paint. To Tim Curlis, the world sounded like tape hiss. He'd not set foot outdoors without a personal stereo since 1983. It was perhaps the most valuable tool in his kit of techniques for avoiding thinking unwelcome thoughts. On this occasion however, it backfired. A particularly malicious inner demon reminded him that the LP dubbed onto this casette was currently sitting in a cardboard box in the garage of Serious Girlfriend Number Two.
It must have been that same demon who then made him realise that, at the age of 25, with an extensive record collection, he had never personally owned a record player. His parents owned a record player; they were also currently in possession of the majority of his record collection, as well as a sizeable number of books, periodicals, and VHS tapes, all stored in cardboard boxes in the family's former outside lavatory/laundry (turned into a storage shed when the sewer was connected and indoor plumbing became de rigeur for the 1970s householder).
Serious Girlfriend Number One and Serious Girlfriend Number Two also owned record players, and both had likewise been enlisted as part-archivists of the Curlis Collection as a de-facto condition of release from Serious Girlfriend status.
And this morning Tim left a note on the kitchen bench of Serious Girlfriend Number Three, another fine, upstanding, record-player-owning citizen, asking if it would be alright if he came back at some indeterminate point in the future to pick up a few things he'd left in the spare room; in cardboard boxes. There was of course no way for her to answer in the negative. What mattered to him at the time was that he was taking a calculated risk over the survival of priceless cultural assets accumulated during the course of Serious Relationship Three. She could throw them out in a fit of pique, though it was more likely she wouldn't.
What mattered to him now, however briefly, was that all the evidence pointed towards his being a serial parasite, leaving behind cardboard boxes as a mosquito leaves behind red welts after moving onto the next host. This most unwelcome of unwelcome thoughts assaulted his sense of himself as the quintessential rational human. He does not behave unjustly; only in error. He is not moved, nor does he move others, by emotion. To fracture this bedrock is to allow that, perhaps, he was just a thoughtless, selfish little shit.
"Tailors Creek, next stop."
Hallelujah! Thoughts must now be directed to getting self, satchel, big bag of clothes, other big bag of clothes, off the train, then onto the bus to Port Dalston and into new digs before nightfall.