White Knuckle Ride

by Alan Carter

  The most popular demonstration is when he selects a scene in a film and plays it for them with the soundtrack turned off. Oh yes, they all nod their heads at that one. What is a film without its dialogue? Its musical score? And? he prompts. The more alert suggest obvious sound effects — claps of thunder, car horns, slamming doors. But most forget what he has just been teaching them: the sounds of rooms, of spaces. Known as atmos, these are just as important to the film’s soundtrack but are detectable only when they are absent or when they are wrong.

  Atmos 14 is part of his stock in trade. He has been using it for years.

  He remembers the precise moment when he walked into the living room of his ex-wife’s Aunt Shelley’s house. The party — a Christmas affair, sherry and rumballs and relatives on their best behaviour — was happening in the front room of the house, with its plump armchairs and antimacassars and doily-draped rosewood. He’d found the living room by mistake, opening the wrong door while looking for the bathroom. ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree’ was playing on the stereo two rooms away. He could hear subdued conversation and the clinking of glasses. But all of that he tuned out, arrested by the sound of the room. He gazed up, around, taking in the dimensions, and put his ear to the plasterboard wall. He walked the room’s perimeter, judging ratios, gauging the shifts in ambience from door to wall, from corner to corner. He stood on a reclining chair beneath moulded cornices, hearing the air curve. Listening intently, trying to isolate each aural particularity, he bemoaned the fact that his spectrum analyser was not, for once, in the boot of the car. This space — it was a gem. With its waxed floorboards and panelled wainscot, the shabby velveteen drapes and brittle ceilings, the room had a pleasing balance, singular in its rendering, between dead and alive, dull and bright, an assemblage of aural reflections and refractions that was so, so — right.

  He was seduced by the sound of the room, coveted what he heard.

  His ex-wife, taut-faced, had to lead him away by the elbow half an hour later when his absence from the pleasantries in the front room had been remarked upon.

  He returned next day with his gun mike and recorder to woo the steely-eyed Aunt Shelley. Feigning an air of bonhomie and charm, he explained his mission (for mission it was). Her purple glasses slipped down her nose sceptically, but he eventually managed to persuade her that recording the sound of an empty room was a perfectly everyday madness in his line of work.

  The hairs on his arms quivered as he aimed the gun mike in different directions, at different elevations, hoping to capture an atmos suite whose subtle variations were as true on tape as they were in the room. What was it about this room? What word would describe the nebulous qualities of its appeal?

  It was not until he played back the recording in the acoustic purity of the studio that he found the answer. Listening in wonder as the shiny ribbon of tape slid over the heads of the machine, he understood the value of what he had curated. If he closed his eyes, he was no longer in the cramped little booth with its overhead light bulb, its crudely lined walls of spongy tiles; he was transported to a room that could, with just the right tweaking, be every room, any room. It was a base from which to simulate a convincing soundscape of real life.

  He had succeeded in capturing the sound of the ordinary.

  The Atmos 14 family realised its potential almost immediately when he used it in the sound design for a ninety-minute telemovie set mostly in a suburban house. The Prodigal Daughter had earned him a reputation for verisimilitude and technical style. Since then he has adapted it for A Boy Named Sam, The Sheridans, Here and There and The Family Way — just a few in a catalogue of successful dramas. Since the advent of reality TV, it has proved its worth all over again. Many times over the years he had returned to re-sample the room: surprisingly, Aunt Shelley had warmed to the idea of her living room being famous (although it was a concept of fame difficult to explain to the neighbours), and even after his divorce from her niece she had been amenable to new recordings. He had relished the opportunity to expand the family of Atmos 14 variants in nuanced ways. Room with Door Open. Room with Door Closed. Room with Six Boring People Sipping Red Wine and Not Speaking (Shelley’s neighbours). Room with Dog Hair on Carpet. Room with Copper Tureen of Minestrone. Room with Drooping Lilies. Room the Night Before a Wake.

  After Shelley’s death, and her bachelor brother Hughie’s inheritance, he had continued his aural mapping with much trepidation, Hughie having waved his uninterested consent from the kitchen, a meat pie in his hand. But, incredibly, in spite of the gradual deterioration of the dwelling generally, thanks to lack of maintenance and Hughie’s slovenly ways, the room remained almost true to its pre-Hughie state. This was, in no small part, because Hughie was lazy and not one for individual touches. Aunt Shelley’s original furniture and furnishings had remained exactly as she left them, and the layers of dust they accumulated over time appeared to adulterate only fractionally the signal-to-noise ratios of the space. Room with Residue of Hughie.

  There is something uncanny about that room, too. Last time he was there, white ants had begun to gain supremacy over the decaying abode, sweeping through front and back verandahs, buckling the uprights and sucking cellulose fibre from the floor-boards. But, miraculously, they had stopped short of the living room, even though the stumps holding up the kitchen only feet away had crumbled to oblivion, causing the Metters first to list and then to sink through the subfloor. A room that stands unscathed while all else teeters around it is surely blessed, he thinks. And as though to prove the truth of its holiness, the foetid house seems to glow from within, right before his eyes.

  He struggles to his feet, knees stiff from crouching, and shoulders his rucksack. The metal sockets of microphones and leads clink softly as he scurries across the road.

  Sanctuary, for the girl, in this unlikely place, at least for two more days. The power has been disconnected; the water from the kitchen tap is a funny colour. There is a yellow smell that the toilet won’t flush away. Fine runnels of something gritty, like sand, escape from sagging ceilings in the kitchen and bathroom. But it’s a decent place to squat. No one knows she is here.

  It’s all hers. Even those boys on skateboards who’d circled the back verandah a few times had abandoned any ideas they might have had. One of them had approached the door and she’d held her breath on the other side. She thinks he might have broken a bone when his runners plunged through the brittle boards of the verandah. An outpouring of fuck and Christ and howling pain. It had taken two others to heft him out, help him hobble away. That was the last she’d seen of them and their paint-spattered hoodies. She has felt safe. Until now.

  There is someone out there. She knows it.

  From the time she was a small girl, she has been able to sense when someone is watching her. The man who waited in the kitchen for her mother to return with cigarettes; she ignored him, watched The Road Runner, but felt his eyes flicking at her bare feet, skinny limbs in pink pyjamas. Her uncle’s slack-lidded appraisal from behind his poker hand. Teachers who suspected her of cheating, her marks unexpected from girls who looked like she did, who came from homes like hers. And Kyle’s incessant surveillance. They had been friends since school, more since she moved in with him, so it hurt her, still, to think of what he’d done, what he was capable yet of doing. The betrayal cut her deepest. He knew about her life, and what he hadn’t known she’d told him, trusting, but he’d used it as ammunition to break her down, keep her down. Everywhere she went, Kyle’s eyes were on her. He could see through walls. For a while, she’d told herself it was paranoia to think he was following her to IGA. But then Cathy had seen him in the carpark, a flash of binoculars behind the steering wheel, aimed at her checkout. A small death when she found the hole drilled in the bathroom wall, hard to spot because of the bubbling of paint, the water-stained plaster dark with mould.

  How could he have found her?

  She moves through the house, hand cupped around a lighted candle, picking her way to
where she has made a small nest for herself out of cushions from an old recliner, the jumper she’d brought with her in a green shopping bag, a blanket of velveteen torn from the house’s curtains. It wasn’t vandalism: the house was going to be pulled down; no one would care.

  Weeks ago, she’d seen the house from the bus window, a man in a yellow hardhat and matching fluoro tunic picking his way carefully over the front verandah with a clipboard, a torch. Then the sign had gone up and boards across a broken window. The next day she’d got off at the closest bus stop and circled back towards the house, keeping some distance, glancing from behind sunglasses. Four times she’d walked past, noticing. There was a collapsing fence but no gate to prevent access. No close neighbours. A laneway at the rear. A quiet neighbourhood. She’d listened to the silence. Perfect.

  Has he found her?

  It’s the only room in the house that isn’t beginning to collapse in on itself, that’s free of that peculiar, suffocating dust of disintegration. She wedges the candle in the hole of a broken brick and hunkers down in her nest, her back to the dark window, shaking before fear that has the contours of a man, lean and sinewy, with ropy arms and curled fists that can split skin.

  Minutes pass. Nothing.

  She is imagining it. Almost laughable, really, her puny self no match for the enormity of that fear. It is pathetic, what she has become.

  A noise at the back door.

  She moves swiftly to pinch the candle between her fingers. He has found her. Her sanctuary is being breached. The flame disappears, but a flare of anger illuminates the room.

  This is her house.

  On the back verandah he struggles with a rusty latch, a warped door. Unlocked — he’d not expected that, had come prepared with a jeweller’s screwdriver, slim and pointed, and some flat paint-scraping tool he’d bought from Bunnings, imagining it might be thin enough to slip between the door frame and the plate of the lock. But here it is, the door unlocked, a gift. Beginner’s luck.

  As he enters the house, his hands are trembling, so intense is the anticipation of acquisition, tempered by imminent loss. For this will be the last time. He knows that what he has come to steal is the room’s dying moments, the laboured breathing that precedes no breath at all. It is the final scene in the story of Atmos 14, the last nuance to be wrung from the ordinary.

  He wedges open the door to the living room, puts down the torch and rucksack. Listens.

  It perplexes him, the denseness, its particulate quality. The literalness of the room’s breathing. As though it is unwilling to be used again, resisting in death the pliable ordinariness that has been its perfection.

  Fanciful. Now analyse. Head to one side, he tries to identify what is different, what is wrong.

  Too swift for conscious recognition, but his ears know what they are hearing: Broken Brick Cleaving Air. The sound of the room dissolving …

  (From The Kid on the Karaoke Stage, short fiction, 2011.)

  RON ELLIOTT

  DOUBLE OR NOTHING

  So far, hopeless gambler Dave has burnt a lot of bridges, which include in ascending order his ex-wife, his boss, the local police, his favourite Cash Converter franchisee and his bookie. When he stumbles across a case of uncut diamonds at the scene of a jeep crash in the Kimberley on the body of a man of some resemblance to his own handsome self, he decides to give the wheel of fortune a hefty spin. What could go wrong?

  Dave stood near the check-in of the Perth International Airport counting the money in the envelope for the third time. One thousand English pounds.

  Dave had shown Ken’s driver’s licence at a pick-up counter in the airport, deciding the photo on that looked a little more like him than the one in Ken’s passport. They gave him a manila envelope. Inside was an airline ticket to Amsterdam and an address. A typed note said Go by the name of Angus MacFergus, rest of payment COD. There was a smaller envelope containing the money.

  Dave bought a carry-on bag for nineteen dollars and ninety-five cents and used his ticket and Ken’s passport to get a boarding pass. As he was walking towards the security person who checked boarding passes and passports he recalled his few international travelling experiences. He’d been to Bali twice and to New Zealand once. Each time had involved questions and X-ray machines. He began to doubt the wisdom of trying to get on the plane with diamonds stuffed in every pocket. So, just before the door of no return, he patted his top pocket, as though searching for cigarettes and turned around and went out of the terminal.

  He got his Telstra van from the parking lot and drove to one of the service gates around the side. He beeped his horn until a security guy came. He didn’t get out of the van. The guard waved and yelled. Dave waved his hand impatiently. The guard finally opened the gate. And Dave drove past him.

  Dave parked his van near the baggage handlers shed and wandered in, yelling at the first guy he saw, ‘You got a problem with the phones?’ It was a safe question. Everyone had problems with their phones. But the guy shook his head and raised his hands and indicated a hearing impairment or too little English and pointed back to an office.

  Dave nodded and waved, but as soon as the worker turned, he joined a luggage trolley heading out towards a Qantas jumbo connected to the departure gate number printed on his boarding pass. ‘Is this the plane to Amsterdam?’ he yelled.

  ‘Man, you can’t come out here,’ yelled the baggage driver.

  Dave pointed to the emblem on his shirt. ‘Telstra.’

  The guy was already driving away towards the open stomach of the plane. The engines were warming, whining painfully.

  Dave went under the back of the plane near the wheels and up the rear steps where they were loading sealed containers of food and drink.

  A hostess blocked his way, just inside the rear door. ‘Hey.’

  ‘Telstra.’ He tapped his chest insignia as though it was a police badge. ‘Your inboard communication system has problems?’

  ‘You’d have to see the captain,’ she said, pointing forward.

  Dave stepped past her into an aisle where early passengers were getting seated. Another hostess stepped out, her smile on hard.

  The first one said, ‘Doesn’t it get fixed by engineers?’

  Dave reached into his envelope and produced his boarding pass and waved it at both of them. When they looked confused, he said to the hostess who’d met him, ‘Just professional interest.’ Then he turned to the hostess in the aisle and said, ‘I wandered back here for a look. I’ll come back later, when you’re not so busy.’

  Dave wandered down the aisle, with his boarding pass out and a studied expression of seat-searching, fighting the tide of passengers coming the other way.

  He found his window seat but someone was in the way. In the aisle seat sat the beautiful woman who had smiled at him from the airport newsagents. Serendipity is a glorious thing when the converging items aren’t jeeps and Telstra vans. He put his empty carry-on in the overhead locker, then gave the woman his winningest smile. ‘I can hoist myself over, or we can shuffle?’

  She stood and stepped out into the aisle and Dave slid and sat too heavily on one of the mounds of rocks in his back pockets. He gasped.

  The beautiful woman moved back into her seat with a swish of knees from her ruffling skirt, looking at him oddly.

  Dave said, ‘So, flying eh?’

  ‘Yes. That’s what my ticket suggests.’ She reached for a magazine.

  Dave considered this first rebuff as no more than part of the process like, say, the haka before a good rugby game. He offered his hand, smiling. ‘Angus MacFergus.’ He thought that next time he said it he might try to put a bit more Scots spittle in ‘Fer’.

  She said, ‘And don’t tell me. You work for Telstra.’

  Dave looked down at his shirt in shock. ‘How did you guess?’

  Dave saw her supress a smile. There was hope. She had dark brown eyes and dark hair and a kind of perfect Italian nose.

  ‘And you are?’

  ‘Not
looking to make a new friend.’ She opened her magazine and started reading. She hadn’t said it that rudely. It wasn’t irrevocable.

  Dave adjusted a couple of the rock bulges in his back pockets. ‘I’m betting that by around the thirteen hour mark, I’ll have worn you down.’

  ‘Given that this flight goes to Singapore and that’s only five and a half hours, those will be very long odds.’

  ‘My favourite kind.’

  Her name was Margaret St James and he did wear her down but somehow she got ahead coming off the plane from Singapore to the Netherlands and Dave couldn’t seem to push through all the other passengers to catch up to her as they filed into Schiphol airport. Then he saw the two dodgy business guys up ahead. They were scanning the passengers. The younger one was tall and tanned and fit-looking. The older one was in his mid-fifties, with an angry red face and rumpled body. They stood with a new thin man in a much better suit. The thin man talked into a walkie-talkie, also examining the incoming passengers. Dave finally felt the prod of alarm and ducked away to the toilets.

  He went into a toilet stall and considered a new plan. Every pocket of his pants was stuffed with the uncut diamonds, the delivery of which would bring him twenty thousand somethings, which it was not unreasonable to assume was cash. Twenty thousand was a very good number to be dealing with, given the debt to Mungo. It was seriously worth the punt.

  Dave figured he might as well get comfortable. He emptied the stones from his pocket into the carry-on bag and joined the dazed and addled line of passengers trudging to customs. He had his passport ready. He felt his breathing go shallow, his pulse begin to get up towards the happy level. He recalled that in many airports today, apart from having men in dark uniforms carrying machine guns, there were also cameras pointing at the incoming. Trained professionals, possibly mothers and priests, scanned the faces of passengers looking for signs of guilt. Dave wondered if the mounting excitement he felt as he approached his customs official would be mistaken for guilt and unleash the machine guns.