by Peter Marks
Before shifting very perceptibly.
Unfortunately Maude had become a little too loving and had stroked the paper coffin too affectionately and Harold moved, levitated actually, to heaven. The last mortal remains of her ex-husband suddenly became atmosphere, turning to a black talc cloud that surrounded a weeping and hysterical Maude who had to be sedated with a mind quieting drug while the staff chased Harold about the shop with several tea strainers trying to foil his escape.
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Wright, ignorant of Maude enveloped by Harold, was still busily trying to evict Quasimodo from his belfry. He could hear alright but all he heard was the ringing of a thousand muted bells tolling away in the vacuum. Time to contemplate a quieter life and permanent deafness he grumbled. Deaf AND dumb Wright winced reflecting on yet another function threatening oversight. Hell of a way to wake up he concluded, recovering the headphones from under his feet, still mumbling to himself while adjusting the volume control of the Walkman before gingerly testing it by holding one tiny speaker to an injured ear. Whether he liked it or not, and he hadn’t, this overloud interlude was to be the beginning of the end of his sleep walking for the day.
The beginning, but not the end, unfortunately.
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With the rape of his senses now begun, he began - to stop talking and restart walking putting one weighted step beyond another until he could weight no longer. Had to wait instead. He stopped in his tracks perched atop the gutter that served drunks as a bed and the road as a border while he calculated the speed of the traffic, searching for a break in the unending procession, and about to learn how the chicken crossed the road.
Watching irritably as angry machines in snaking lines huddled gutter to gutter, barring his way. There was no safe passage to the other side and Wright understood how firewalkers felt the instant before they plunged onto the bright red embers. (Were he not so chronically lazy he would have sauntered down to the traffic lights only yards further down the street where he could have crossed safely, legally. But his sloth was sincere, so he stayed put. Stayed lazy confronted by this restless sea of tyred transports).
There were carbon monoxide belching monsters driven by carbon dioxide belching mothers on their way to the shops. There were beer breathing truckies on their way to the pub; big men parked in huge centipedes pulled up alongside bullshit sprouting salesmen well on their way to ignominious failure.
Cars, trucks, buses, trams. There were people and traffic everywhere.
Wright looked at them floundering like beached whales on a bitumen shore, hearing them dimly through the deafness. The wailing and honking chorus was grunting pollutants into the choking atmosphere stopped for a red and waiting for the green.
A green Wright also chose to move on. Bad choice. Bad move.
He’d looked right, looked left, forgot to look right again. (Remember the last right Wright would often warn following this one. Remember that last right he’d advise or they’ll be holding yours he’d add, then wink knowingly. Knowing then what he didn’t know now).
He sped into a break in the traffic that had appeared as if by magic. Nathan ran as fast as he could but he wasn’t quick enough and the hole evaporated. It went back to the fifth dimension leaving Wright’s dimensions dangerously marooned.
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Zooming past the shops all decorated in sign and neon, a speeding taxi hurtled toward him from three blocks away. Inside the hurtling box, the passenger was eight months pregnant. Sixteen years old. And now two blocks away.
Pauline Murphy and her cargo stomach were on an outing to visit her mother who, crippled and ill, was too immobile to visit them. She and her next generation were seated comfortably in the back where they were being driven by a mad Turk intent on catching the amber before it turned wall (i.e. red).
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From around the corner, it sped toward a Sony deaf, Walkman retarded Wright who was nonchalantly whistling as he crossed.
He didn’t hear it, didn’t see the terrible Turk bearing down on him and only E.S.P. alerted him to the imminent danger. Unfortunately, by the time his Exceptionally Sodden Perceptions finally registered the threat, his reaction was anything but exceptional. (Aside from exceptionally slow).
He stopped dead (metaphorically speaking - prior, it seemed, to a more literal interpretation) standing stock still, rooted to a spot which just happened to be the middle of the road, wondering what to do. He decided on some metaphysics and turned road sign.
“Beware, Idiot Crossing” lit up across a screen chest.
“Beware, Maniac Driving” came the immediate response as the moment of impact approached. Wright was an inert memorial to his own monumental misjudgment standing there white faced and terrified watching death come for him in a cab and there was some mighty quick thinking called for if Wright wanted to outlive his death.
His response was immediate. He grinned. And it wasn’t until death grinned back that he finally moved. Best face forward, Wright threw himself on the mercy of God and the bitumen, unknowingly also parting company with the Walkman which, smarter than he, fled to safety in the ears of another.
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The mad Turk didn’t bat an ethnic eyelid. He was used to this sort of behaviour from kamikaze pedestrians and no-one was going to get their greedy paws on his third party insurance if he could help it, so he deftly swerved, definitely more used to people playing chicken than Wright was to laying - lying as he was face down watching the taxi and his life flash by.
The driver cursed in Turkish, his passenger became hysterical, while Wright’s life sped by year by tortured year before him. Nathan had reached thirty-four, and almost the end, before the cab swerved by thus missing murdering him by a mere birthday. It deftly detoured Wright’s bulk to speed by, a huge hairy arm trailing from the driver side window shaking in tattooed rage at a quaking Wright.
So that’s what Taxi derma means, Wright quivered. The imagined impact of man on metal proved too exciting for the woman to bear and in the back seat of the cab her womb contracted, hers waters gushing to the butt littered floor.
Wright was about to produce a baby.
(Not that Nathan knew nor cared. Nor would he find such news surprising for he had, in his time, inseminated more women than his memory would care to acknowledge. Or remember).
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Coughing prayers amongst the dust, he was too busy suffocating to think about sex, past or present, so he remained ignorant.
Wright was desperately trying to catch his breath through mitten lungs while considering the question of bravery. Was it a necessary virtue? Or just a negotiable one? He tried to figure out if it was better to die upright or live prone. Decided valour was redundant. And life threatening. And had instinctively chosen cowardice.
Wright had embraced pusillanimity diving for safety and continued existence in a smart move which had saved his butt but not his face. It had set thick in a beard of porridge black tar. (Wright was now tarred, and any more chicken, be feathered).
Not an auspicious start to the day he grumbled in profound understatement. First the dog, then the ears, now himself. What next? He wondered, wondering if his health insurance was up to date before removing himself from the bog, standing up wearing it so attempted to remove the muck.
Much to his consternation, Nathan discovered that the more spiritedly he tried to brush it off, the more stubborn, and thick, the mix got. It swallowed his hand, adhering it to the his chest. Wright resembled an amputee Black and White Minstrel. Looking at his chest, he found road works, suddenly noticing a three lane freeway crossed his sternum which appeared to bemused onlookers standing on the sidewalk heckling him, as a huge black bra. Which he adjusted (which made him look like a transvestite amputee Black and White Minstrel). Then he lost the other hand. He wrestled with his fists to get them off the street on his chest before looking up and realising his fists weren’t t
he only part of him still playing on the road.
He was!
The fucker was still in the middle of it and decided that a strategic retreat from this somewhat tenuous position dead centre of an again busy thoroughfare was desirable. Was imperative actually, so he ran with all the speed and haste his father displayed every-time the new girlfriend (Horrible Hilda, Wright called her) asked him to attend mass with her. (‘A Mass Exodus’ Wright called it). Wright’s flight was equally frantic but he finally made it. The chicken had crossed the road.
He stood winded but safe on the side of the road he’d wanted to reach, scratching his head in bemused amazement. Suddenly decided something was missing so he checked his arms. Both were present. Felt his legs, nothing unusual - nothing broken, nothing missing. Then it dawned on him.
‘My Walkman,’ Wright gasped in horror, immediately turning around to survey the spot from whence he’d fled. Nothing. Not even blood.
Exasperated, he searched the blackness for clues. Then he spotted it. It was strung around the neck of a bouncing midget, Michael Jackson fingerless glove on one hand, Wright’s Walkman in the other leaning short and gloating inside the tram shelter opposite.
The minimal being was waiting for the No. 1 tram to the city dressed in his Sunday best (or Wednesday worst. It was hard to tell. Even harder to appreciate). The thing wore tight jeans, fluorescent sneakers devoid of socks and a faded yellow T-shirt which had this written in large letters across it:
“My mother loves me though we’ve never met.’
Wright was in no doubt that this fact.
Intrigued, Wright watched it for a while, observing the small rodent grinning toothless and triumphant nursing the Walkman which was the feral headed one’s latest acquisition.
And Wright’s property.
This time there was no right, or left, just Wright and his anger moving sure and swift through traffic that had previously proven so daunting. It was truly amazing how the sudden loss of four hundred dollars tended to create a VC brave Wright and he was back on the other side before the proud new owner could play track one, side one.
At the tram stop, Nathan loomed angrily over the thing.
‘Congratulations, you’re the proud new owner of my as new, very expensive, recently thieved Walkman,’ he said. ‘I suppose you understand I had to sell my sisters into slavery to afford that machine so I trust you have several beautiful sisters with huge bazoomas to swap or you’re in big trouble!’ Wright wheezed, his teeth gritted an inch from the thing’s ear, hovering a full two foot above the small shape.
‘No? Well then, give me that you little bastard before I make you shorter than a picnic on a wet day,’ he roared, relieved that he’d been ripped of by such an unbelievably petty thief and not some Kong like structure on its way home from a smash and grab.
The crook cowered, looked sheepish as it slowly, forlornly began to disengage itself from Wright’s Walkman while Nathan stood up straighter and even taller, watching fascinated. Puffed and perplexed, Nathan was amazed by the microbe he’d apprehended. He still wasn’t able to figure out what it was. Was it a boy or a man, a girl or woman, a thing or a throwback ? Scowling, he thought that whatever it was, it sure was small; so minute in fact that it should certainly have been thrown back into the sea by who-ever first fished it out.
Truly he, she, it, was certainly an unusual assemblage of vaguely recognisable appendages for bits and pieces of it were familiar but many of the bits seemed to be where the pieces should have been.
And vice versa.
Wright frowned, coughed nervously, guiltily, momentarily overwhelmed with pity for one so unfortunate. For one brief fleeting moment, he actually considered bequeathing his machine to the poor little buggar. (A charitable impulse, one that, like so many of Wright’s more humanitarian responses was so fleeting as to disappear before it could be recognised. Or acted upon).
It had one hell of a pituitary problem this mutant. It looked sad and pathetic but unrepentant.
‘Sorry mister,’ it said, shrill tiny voice quivering, two damp eyes beginning to flood, ‘but I thought you were dead.’
Apparently this human punctuation mark had courageously, without fear for its own safety, rushed onto the road to save Wright’s machine from Wright’s fate for in the opinion of the short one Wright was about to become just another rock fan rolled. Flat.
Sadly, the wee one had been mistaken. It had got the loot alright but the funeral wrong for Wright remained firmly in the land of the living as it quickly discovered when Wright, growing impatient, repossessed his property along with a portion of the thing’s left ear. Like a dumped pup, it let out a pained yelp and covered the now flapping red lobe Wright had almost detached.
Wright sighed, feeling terrible for assaulting some-one so small, something so strange. Could be an extraterrestrial Wright thought, looking to check there was no hidden Galactic Gattling Gun strapped while still trying to ascertain nationality, sex or intelligence. Or planet of residence. Simply couldn’t, so gave up and with a careless shrug, turning to leave the oddity who was standing beside him still pleading its case.
‘Fair dinkum mister, I thought you were a goner...’ it wailed, looking a trifle shocked at having its new toy repossessed by a ghost, its tiny feet quaking in tiny boots on the verge of crying and Wright thought he should get out of here before the thing broke his resolve and made him sign over his life savings to it in a fit of remorse.
‘Really, gee mister honest, cross my heart and hope you die.’
‘What?’ Wright interrupted sharply.
The thing continued more cautiously. ‘...hope to die,’ it reappraised. ‘Dinkum! I thought you were dead,’ it again certified.
‘A bloody miracle kid,’ Wright replied casually, feeling a little like Jesus after the resurrection but then felt that Jesus may take it as a personal insult so stopped feeling resurrected and started feeling himself, again checking that nothing was broken and finding no traces of blood or impacted bone, strode off down the road determined to get to work undead before Christmas.
Obviously the ears had cleared because he heard the creature crying.
Shit, Wright hissed, turning around to see the wounded thing watering the pavement and realised he couldn’t leave it in such pain. He wondered if he should shoot it and put it out of its misery. And beyond Wright’s conscience.
Silently he finally decided and went back to it and patting its tiny skull, extracted the tape from the Walkman and gave the weeping winnow the cassette. It stopped weeping, began smiling.
Wright told he, she, it to cheer up. Told the particle to go look for its mother and left.
Walking off, Wright began to wonder if he’d ever get to work but thought that he may at least get to heaven now so smiled. Whistling to keep himself awake, Wright walked two streets further before stopping momentarily in front of a cream brick house. There was a strutting plaster aboriginal statue, spear in hand, racist in actuality, marooned in the middle of a small pond in a green lawn. This piece of native kitsch was surrounded by an immaculate garden, verdant shades of waving colours and vibrant tones dancing gaily in the sunlight, lightly shifting in the freshening breeze, a small forest of writhing rainbow serpents. Part of this festival of delight encroached untidily across Wright’s path, but Wright ignored it. Instead, he leant over the white picket fence and borrowed a particularly lovely specimen, a bright pink carnation, petals gleaming. Snatching it from its bed, he admired its beauty.
Then ripped it to shreds.
‘She loves me, she loves me not, she loves me,’ he recited blandly, gradually dismembering the fragile formation, seriously contemplating love and life and why it was getting so damn difficult to perform even the simplest of tasks without screwing up. Things like getting to work for instance.
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Now getting to work from four blocks away would seem, to most, a relatively simple task. Not Wright. People have explored en
tire continents with less difficulty. Remarkably, the human defoliant managed to negotiate the final streets without further incident which, considering the hang-over Wright had, and the brush with death which he’d just had, and the intelligence, which given the time of day Wright hadn’t, that he’d arrive still in one piece was surely a miracle. Which Wright certainly wasn’t.
He stopped the floral rearrangement only when he discovered she loved him not.
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Later that day, had he not been so preoccupied with himself and his apparently lost love, he would have heard on the radio about the only child he may ever produce.
Here is the news:
“At eleven thirty this morning, Ms. Pauline Murphy of Bundoora South gave birth to a one month premature baby boy in the back seat of a Silver Top taxi. Miss Murphy, 17, was on her way to visit her terminally ill mother when the incident occurred. Mother and child are described as being in good condition following her ordeal and were transferred to Western General Maternity by ambulance following the delivery”.
Ms. Murphy took two days to name the child. She called him Early.
Synchronicity.
Chapter Sixteen
ALTER EGOS
WITH A HEFTY SQUEAL, tyre collided with gutter. Kelly smiled guiltily at Wright who told her, while reaching for a cigarette and lighting it, that her eyes needed a retread. Kelly just laughed and sent him packing.
Fossicking for his ticket in a blue Qantas bag which he clutched firmly to his side, he grabbed a trolley and loaded it with two heavy suitcases, blue and new. About him, packed tightly on the busy walkway, other travellers were busy shepherding their mountainous luggage through the automatic glass doors that yawned every few seconds to gobble them up. Kissing Kelly good-bye, he told her he’d see her Saturday, waved farewell then watched until her and her car were lost to the distance.