Smythe's Theory of Everything

by Robert Hollingworth

  At that time I think we were among the first to ever come up with the idea of creating our own home in an empty building. They call them squatters now but we were one of the first. Of course the authorities would call us homeless. But who says home is cooped up in some suburban nightmare with a parent whose life is somewhere else? And what about all those nomadic people, are they homeless?

  We had an upstairs room as good as any house and a real toilet block just two streets away. We started hanging around the Victoria Market and we had an Airways bag that we filled with all sorts of things that weren’t fit for selling. We met an old Asian lady and sometimes we’d help her pack up at night and she’d give us leftover mangos, bananas, loose grapes. And every day we’d go off on some adventure around the city and you wouldn’t believe the things you can do for free. At night we always curled up together on the floor. We were really close, like brothers and sisters should be, and night after night we’d just lie there in the dark with the faint noise of traffic and pigeons, and tell each other stories.

  I don’t pretend we had it good all the time. I remember times when Kitty would get anxious, as if deep down inside her something else was trying to surface. On those nights she’d tell a different story, one about a magic snow sleigh. I never quite understood it but Kitty said she often closed her eyes tight and imagined riding that Christmas sleigh, the wind in her hair, gliding freely down white slopes, through snow-bound forests, across frozen lakes and then down again; on and on, riding as if nothing could stop her. What for, I often wondered. Now I am amazed that it never occurred to me how troubled that little sister of mine was.

  To comfort her I’d make up fantastic stories that had nothing to do with reality. Other times I’d just talk - and so would she - about everything, though never the past or the future. We lived in the present which a lot of people seem to forget about. It is a subject I would one day create a theory about, though I never thought of it then.

  Only here at so-called ‘Eden’ nursing home do people live in the present. That’s because their past is long lost to them - that’s why they’re here. Can’t remember their own names let alone what happened this morning. But I remember those times with Kitty as if they were yesterday. We’d lie there in the dark in the old Daco building and make up stories as good as any movie. Sometimes I wish we’d written them down.

  I wake each morning hoping it’s all a dream. Then reality dawns. One minute I’m in St Vincent’s having an operation, standard procedure, and then I’m in here - poof ! Lisa’s idea of course. I open my eyes a few days after the op and there’s some bloke leaning over the bed.

  ‘You’ll be very comfortable here,’ he says.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here, at Eden.’ Eden? Had I ascended to heaven? Then, I look around the room and start to get the picture.

  ‘I’ll see you in a week or so,’ the doc says and suddenly I’m alone.

  Since then I’ve noticed that the staff seem to hate this place as much as I do. Yesterday I overheard one of them complaining that they get 20 per cent less pay than the nurses in public hospitals. This morning I asked Dell Williams about it but she wouldn’t be drawn on the subject. I got better results asking her about the inmates. Eighty-eight in total, two divisions, the more affluent in the West Wing, the cheapies over here. Overall, at least two new ones each month.

  ‘Does that mean two have died?’ I ask. Dell stiffens up immediately. She seems to be better than some of the others, one of the youngest nurses here - actually they aren’t officially nurses at all, more like nurse’s aides - but like all the others, she doesn’t want to give out too much information.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ she replies.

  ‘Oh, so you mean the numbers are growing?’

  ‘Heavens no! There aren’t enough beds as it is.’

  As not a single soul ever escapes this place on foot, I can only assume they leave in a box. So what are the odds of getting through a fortnight without someone in here dropping dead? Well, as anyone can see they are zero. How many people can boast living arrangements where every two weeks at least one person dies under their own roof ? Yesterday they rolled out another poor soul, right past my door. I tried to close the door quickly in case her spirit came floating in and took up residence right here in the corner of my room. Now it’s midnight and I can’t sleep for thinking about it.

  We were at the Daco about three months when we woke one night to hear faint scratching in the outside alcove. The next morning we saw an old bloke walking away and he got out under the fence at the same spot we used. Next evening he was back again. One night it stormed like no tomorrow and the wind rattled the windows. We heard a new sound coming from outside and I looked through a crack in the door and saw the same old bloke sitting on the concrete and he was crying. It was freezing out there and he was wet through. Silhouetted against the city lights you could see the steam coming off his woollen coat. He sat hunched over, his broad back shaking with the sobs.

  But that’s not why we let him in. We could see he wasn’t going to go away and eventually the cops would catch on and come and investigate. That meant they’d find out about us as well. So one night when he arrived he found me sitting in his alcove. He just stood there staring. He wasn’t very tall but his big coat, patchy beard and hair tied back in a ponytail made him look dangerous. I was only sixteen after all and I was as nervous as hell.

  He just looked at me and said, ‘I stay here.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, ‘and if you keep staying here they’re going catch you for being on private property. The sign says Keep Out.’

  He just kept staring and I could hear rattling in his chest.

  ‘What about you? S’pose you must be above the bloody law then?’

  ‘I’m not intending to stay here exposed to the world until they come and march me somewhere else.’

  ‘Well what if I don’t give a fuck about that. You think I care? What are they going to do, take every bloody penny I got? They give you a cup of bloody tea and a bowl of soup and you’re on your bloody way.’ He stuck one of his knobby forefingers under his nose and pushed it roughly from side to side.

  I said, ‘You got any friends?’ He just stared. ‘Street friends,’ I added.

  ‘Street friends? Yeah, Henry Bolte is a good street friend of mine and H. R. Petty is my best pal.’

  I’d heard of Bolte, our Premier - I’d seen him on TV.

  ‘Who’s H. R. Petty?’ I said.

  ‘Christ you bloody kids are a waste.’ He looked right through me.

  ‘I live in here,’ I said thumbing over my shoulder. The guy stared at the big wooden door padlocked shut.

  ‘Me and someone else. We can get you in if you don’t fuck up our living arrangements.’ I said the ‘f ‘ word because he did, and I thought it might suggest some sort of solidarity. He looked up at the building as though seeing it for the first time.

  I didn’t look at him.

  ‘You want to sleep in there or not?’

  ‘I’m not getting mixed up with no thieves and bloody pickpockets,’ he said at last. I stood up and he followed me around to the cellar door. He waited for me to get in first. Behind me he said, ‘Horace Petty is our Minister for Housing - Petty by name, petty by nature.’

  I told him we were Jack and Kitty and the old guy said his name was Dr Milo.

  ‘Doctor? You mean like helping people …’

  ‘I mean like PhD. You know what that is? Course not. It’s a qualification; the idea is you think of a topic, study it real hard, write a hell of a lot of stuff down, pass it across the desk of some bloody faculty or other and then you get to join them. They give you a framed bloody certificate, a new title at the front of your name and some letters on the back and away you go.’

  I stared at him. ‘You did that?’

  He looked around the big empty space and his voice echoed. ‘Don’t believe every bloody thing you hear son, OK?’

  He said Milo was a nickname and it made
me think maybe we should have changed our names as well but it was too late once we’d introduced ourselves. He also said to drop the ‘doctor’ - if we were going to share a house, it should be on a first-name basis. Then Milo stayed on and we began to look forward to our times together. He never came up to our room and we never went into his but sometimes late into the night we’d all sit down on the floor in our ‘Office’ and just talk. The Office was an area near the main entrance, sectioned off by a glass partition and a low wall of wooden hutches. Those hutches each had a label on them, things like pending, returns and hp&l and we would take it in turns thinking up explana-tions for those words. pending was the sound biros make when they hit the polished floor.

  Like us, Milo was good at telling stories. One night we sat in the dim light of the street and Milo told us about an astronomer who spent his life in a government observatory monitoring sunspots and events on the surface of the sun. By night he studied the stars. Immediately it took me back to Preston and my planets poster - up until my sixteenth birthday I felt I’d been doing the same thing in the confines of my own bedroom. Milo said the astronomer knew the stars and planets better than he knew people and places on earth. Then one day the government closed the observatory and reopened it as a tourist attraction. The astronomer was out of a job and suddenly realised he had the same bewildering relationship to the world that ordinary people had to the cosmos.

  ‘That astronomer disappeared right up his own pipe of prisms and lenses,’ he said.

  It was so dark in the ‘Office’ that night we could hardly see each other.

  ‘You were the astronomer,’ Kitty said.

  ‘Well, who bloody knows?’ he replied, his usual gruff voice almost a whisper. ‘Who can say what any of us are. Sometimes we’re one thing, sometimes we’re another.’

  Kitty stared at his dark form wide-eyed. ‘Couldn’t … couldn’t the astronomer get another job?’

  ‘Who wants an old astronomer? Who wants an old anything? Once you hit fifty there’s a shitload of people the same age as your own children ready to take over all the positions. Anyway, what’s it matter? Freedom to make your own decisions - that’s what we need - and to ponder the big questions.’

  Milo often pondered the big questions. Like why we say ‘the sun is going down’ when for centuries we’ve known that the sun hasn’t moved at all.

  Me, I liked calculating things. The only subjects at school I ever liked were maths and science. I liked them because they came easy to me - even though I hated our teacher and the way he, in turn, hated the students and his mediocre job. One day we were given a long and protracted formula for calculating the surface area of complex shapes - I think the idea was to put us off the subject forever. I spent the class reinterpreting the given formula, simplifying it to something streamlined and beautiful - even if it only worked for particular types of shapes. That little misdemeanour cost me four enthusiastic lashes across the palm with Carter’s yard of hardened leather. And so I learned an important lesson: what is deemed correct by authority should not be tampered with.

  But it never dulled my interest in calculation. When we lived at the Daco I worked out there were 5210 bricks in the end wall, allowing for the double brick, the windows and the taper to the ceiling, and that the total weight was something near 24 tons - each brick approximately 7 pounds multiplied by the total and including the mortar which has a calculable length and thickness but is slightly less dense than the bricks themselves.

  Why do I do it, you might ask? Well, a wall is just a wall, a starry sky is just a starry sky - until you start to investigate its essence, and then it becomes nothing short of a miracle. I found my miracles by calculation, Milo found his by pondering the big questions. But Milo didn’t want answers, he just wanted to dwell on the mysteries and meaning of life rather than the mundane, rather than the hack of ambition which he said had ambushed all those people rushing about outside.

  We never talked about the people who might have worked in the Daco - beyond speculating on what the letters in that name stood for: Daft Accountants Company; Dead Animal Collection Office. And sometimes we sat for hours in the silence of that big old Daco building just thinking about things and watching fine dust float in the light. There was no forgotten past lingering in that massive old factory. Some people think that the spirit of all that’s happened is still somehow embedded in the brickwork or emanating off the old dusty desks pushed against the wall. But we lived there for a year and I can tell you it’s no more than a big hollow chamber. You occupy that chamber like a crab inside a seashell until one day it starts to feel like a part of you.

  Just had a visit from the doctor. I never called for him and I don’t have any more ailments than usual but there he was just the same. I think he was visiting the old geriatric next door and just looked in on me in passing. Of course right behind him I had a very large nurse looking on - as if it’s got the slightest to do with her!

  ‘Could you stand up for me?’ the doc says.

  ‘No,’ I reply, ‘I don’t think I’m quite up to that yet.’

  ‘Come on, up you get,’ he says as if I hadn’t spoken.

  ‘I’d rather not,’ I say.

  ‘Come on Mr Smythe, just put some weight on and let’s see what happens.’

  Meanwhile that great big nurse stands there, arms folded, smart and smarmy. She’s loving it. She’s tried this before, tried to get me to walk, but what they fail to recognise is that I’m on the inside, I know what’s going on in my own body and I know when I’m ready and when I’m not. The upshot is I finally stood silently in my slippers just to please them and I also chose to grin and bear the discomfort of it all. I figured that as soon as I satisfied them the sooner they’d leave me alone. I was right.

  One night Kitty went upstairs early. She’d been sniffing and sneezing all day and just wanted to curl up in a ball until it all passed. That left me and Milo and as always we went to the Office. Even before we sat down on the floorboards Milo said, ‘I’m working on a big theory’.

  ‘How big?’ I said, casually.

  ‘Very big.’

  ‘About the universe?’

  ‘Bigger than that. Like why it’s all there in the first place.’

  ‘The Big Bang.’

  ‘ The Big Bang?’ Milo rocked backwards and I caught a whiff of him. We could all do with a bath.

  ‘The big pop and fizzle more like it! No more balls than a cork coming out of a bottle of Porphyry Pearl. Think about it. What’s more intellectually rigorous, a sudden explosion that brought time, space, people and bananas into being or a God that conceived and created the Heavens and Earth over a solid bloody week?’

  ‘You … you believe in God?’

  Milo’s burst of laughter bounced off the brickwork and stirred the dust.

  ‘God, schmod, but it’s just as ballsy a theory as the Big Bang - or Big Bloody Wang some might say.’

  Then we sat a long time in silence. Anyone would say it was completely dark and cold, but we didn’t see it that way. We were used to it and our eyes were accustomed to the dimness; we could pick out the pigeons roosting on a far ledge and, below them, the streaks of grey that ran down the wall. Through our eyes we saw the detail: the cobwebs and the wires hanging down, all the light fittings gone, the iron rods that once held ceiling fans.

  I had almost forgotten what we were talking about when Milo suddenly said, ‘Let’s put the Big Bang through the wringer - the wringer of known facts. If such a thing were to take place it would have to do it within some pre-existing context, wouldn’t you say? And if it’s going to happen, then it’s a bloody event, and an event has to be incubated in or with something else. Newton says, “no action ever happens of or by itself ” - it’s a simple law of physics. That means the so-called Big Bang has to have been caused by something. You stare at the sky as long as I have and it becomes obvious.’

  Milo scratched his beard, a sound as familiar as the creak of leather.

  ‘Now
I don’t say our cosmos doesn’t have some natural origin - just as a mountain or a river does. Just that the dawn of the universe wasn’t the first bloody thing.’

  Milo shifted position, stretched his legs out and tucked his blanket around him. I heard him scratch his whiskers again. I too was starting to get quite a bit of strong stubble and found myself mimicking his action.

  ‘A New Theory of Everything; that’s what’s needed,’ he said at last.

  I thought of the planets and my old poster of the Solar System. Milo’s idea excited me. My head fairly buzzed with ideas and in the darkness I could feel my face redden with the thought of it all. Milo had sparked something and a wave of energy passed through me like nothing I’d ever felt.

  ‘What do you think it is then?’ I said, almost breathlessly.

  ‘Well now, that’s the bloody question isn’t it? You want my opinion? I think the Big Bang is like the paintings they made of Australia long before the new land was even discovered - a nice idea to exercise the mind while we wait for a better picture of things.’

  Suddenly I heard Kitty’s footfalls on the stairs and she came to sit on the floor with us. She was shivering and she said she’d been having the bad dreams again. I pulled her in under my blanket and put my arms around her. It must have been about three in the morning. Milo shifted position and I felt a wave of disappointment. Our moment had passed and even before he spoke I knew there’d be a change in subject.

  ‘Now listen you two,’ he said. ‘When I die, I want you to do something special for me.’

  Kitty and I straightened and looked towards the dark recess where he sat.

  ‘If you got any balls you’ll drag me down to the big stormwater grate on the corner of McKillop and York and chuck me in. And then the next rain will take me right under the city. I want to be buried under all those bloody buildings, way down there with the Aborigines!’ Then he laughed and we laughed as well and we agreed it was a fitting end for city-dwellers like us. Then, even in that dark void, I saw his face drop like wet newspaper.