‘Tumour’s back. They said he wouldn’t survive another one.’
Damien’s eyes are glistening. It might be the wind. Donna wonders if he’d want his family saved from the wave or if he’d be happy if they drowned. His dad’s a prick, but he’s dying now and that changes everything.
Donna takes the can from Damien’s hand. She stamps her cigarette butt out on the floor of the ute tray and takes a swig.
‘Who would you bring up here if you knew a wave was coming? Who’d you want to be stuck with in this washed-out shithole for the rest of your life?’
‘Hell, Don.’
‘I’m just sayin’…’
‘Well, don’t. Just bloody don’t.’
‘You worried about your dad?’ Donna sighs.
‘Nah, mate. It’s all over for him. He’s cactus. It’s Mum I’m worried about.’
‘What’ll she do?’
Donna thinks that if she was Damien’s mum she’d probably chuck a party when the old fella kicked it, but she figures Damien doesn’t want to hear that right now.
‘I’d bring you up here. You and Jesus,’ he says.
Donna smiles. She knows he only said it to make her feel better. But even that’s something.
JIMMY AND ANDY
The Bedside Cinema
The Bedside Cinema, opposite the old theatre they are pulling down, used to be a church but the priests abandoned the building and in came the porn stars. They kept the pews and the pulpit, for those patrons with God issues, and added a silver screen.
Sitting in the back row, underneath the projectionist’s booth, I can see the smoke stains from the votive candles.
I catch an unexpected smell and look around to see where it’s coming from. It smells like fire. The whole audience – there are seven of us day-time viewers – notice. It takes everyone’s eyes from the screen at a critical moment in the ‘plot’, if you know what I mean. A man in the front row stands, puts his hands on his hips – his silhouette shows a bulge in his pants – and swings his torso from side to side as he looks for the source of the smell. Others follow suit – showing off their erections, putting their hands on their hips and swaying their torsos. Like some sort of horny aerobics warm up. One of them looks like Andy, but I can’t be sure.
I don’t have an erection to show off. (In fact, I have been questioning why I still come to this place. It never seems to do anything for me anymore.) I stay in my seat, which makes me look guilty. Everyone stops swaying and points their erections at me. It is very threatening.
Their stares incriminate me and I want to say something. (‘It’s okay, I didn’t summon the fire. It wasn’t me!’) (‘Do you think we are damned?’) But I keep my mouth shut and spin my head from side to side, looking from the vestibule to the pulpit, seeking answers. The men, hands still on hips, turn to look at each other in a coordinated movement that is so silken that it might just be preordained.
Light flickers behind them as the movie splutters and splurges through the first orgasm scene, and white overtakes flesh as whole frames disappear into blinding silvery nothingness. The amplified moans and groans stop and start as the movie flickers in and out until the woman and her fireman have disappeared into a hot glow, illuminating every dust mote on every pew and every frayed edge of velvet curtain and every candle smoke stain on the wall. The light fills the room with heat too, and, as panic starts to rise, I understand the strange smell – the film has burned up, it has been razed as it whirled through the spool, too hot for its own good.
Intense light spills from the projection room. I stand (my fear of being burned alive has finally overtaken my embarrassment at not being aroused) and run out from under the projection room to get a better look at what is going on. The others, who are no longer pointing with their genitals, follow my gaze. Our heads lift to the high raked ceilings, into the room where the images are projected onto the screen, from which a pure light is emanating gloriously. It is not fire, it is too bright. I squint and shield my eyes from the searing light. The others are all in prayer, heads bowed against the glare. Or perhaps they are cowering in fear.
Then the light splits, a peach’s flesh under a knife, and a figure appears in the booth. A woman.
‘It’s the woman from the film!’ someone calls.
‘You’re an idiot!’ I say to the man. ‘Are you okay up there?’ I call up to the projection room.
She waves, or at least I think she’s waving. Then a burst of white smoke comes from her hands and I realise she’s waving a fire extinguisher over the flames of the celluloid.
‘Can I help you? How can I get up there?’ I yell at her, but she ignores me. I wouldn’t want me up there either, if I was her. It’s obvious I’m a creep. But I’m also a sort of professional broadcaster, so we are sort of contemporaries and I feel responsible.
I race to the back of the theatre, push open the door that says ‘No Entry Staff Only,’ and follow the flight of stairs up to the projection booth. The smoke gets thicker with each step, the smell of burning film acrid and abrasive. Opening the door to the booth, smoke billows out like a parachute filling with air, covering me, suffocating.
‘Are you okay?’ I yell again.
‘Over here!’ she shouts back. I fight my way through the smoke to get to the other side of the booth.
She passes me an extinguisher and I fumble with it, inept and useless, as usual, at important tasks. I hear Andy telling me I’m shit, I’m pointless, I’m a dick. But I push him down, hard. Finally I figure out the pin, and depress the handle and the white powder billows out. It throws me against the wall. But the fire is dying out and the woman grabs me by the arm.
‘C’mon let’s get out of here. There’s too much smoke.’
Following her down the stairs, I’m convinced she is some kind of superhero. Back on the ground floor, the sirens wail in the near distance.
‘Kind of ironic, don’t you think?’ I say to the woman. ‘A film about firefighters, and here we are…’
She grimaces at me and turns to walk towards the fire fighter.
Her disdain is obvious and it stings. But what do I expect? She’s a superhero and I’m a creep and a weirdo and just smart enough to know it, which makes me the worst kind of creepy weirdo.
I hang around to answer the firefighter’s questions, and then the police’s questions and overhear conversations about the place being beyond repair, likely to be demolished. Looking along Plane Tree Drive, the trees are in full orange glory and I’m glad the fire didn’t spread. Those leaves would have been perfect tinder and is such a nice place to live, aside from the smouldering old church cum porno theatre on the corner.
Community Radio
‘Hey Jude’ is playing. I fought with Andy over whose ‘Hey Jude’ we should play. He wanted his CD version, but of course that’s only because he doesn’t remember how to queue up vinyl. But what’s ‘Hey Jude’ with the chemical gloss of a CD?
The track ends and I hit Mic 1 and Mic 2.
‘‘Hey Jude’, for all you Beatles fans. And you know, Andy, wasn’t that better than that CD version? C’mon Andy, be honest with Jimmy.’
‘Jimmy, only tossers refer to themselves in the third person. Queue the next track. This is Nine Inch Nails with a number that was recorded for CD. Press the damn button, Jimmy.’
Andy gets up from his chair, throws his headphones onto the desk with more than his usual disdain, and flops onto the green vinyl couch in the corner of the studio. He shuts his eyes and his arm dangles over the edge of the couch onto the floor like a lazy ape. I don’t know how he can even sit on that couch; it must have been from the 1950s and had never once been cleaned. The foam stuffing is bursting out of it like pus from a green blister and whenever anyone sits on it puffs of dust form clouds like a swarm of micro-beasts. It is rank.
‘You’re on 89.9 Community Radio, it’s three-thirteen am on the knocker, here’re the Nails,’ I say as I watch Andy become engulfed in the ancient spores of the couch.
‘No one’s listening? No one? I beg to differ, my friend. Last week we put a call out and the phones lit up. Two callers.’
‘Yeah, I’ve never been so flat chat in all my life. That was crazy, man.’ Andy’s eyes flick up to the On Air sign above the studio door, directly in his line of sight from his reclining position on the couch. ‘You didn’t turn the mics off, for fuck’s sake!’
I follow his glance. Andy is right, I haven’t turned the mics off. I press the buttons.
‘Jesus.’
‘Don’t worry, like I said, no one’s listening.’
‘Really?’ I ask, pointing to Line 1, flashing red.
‘Hello, 89.9 Community Radio,’ I say.
‘I’m listening.’
The line goes dead.
‘What was that?’
‘Someone said, “I’m listening” and hung up.’
‘Proves my point, only weirdos and freaks listen to community radio at 3am on Thursday morning.’
It is hard to build an argument against Andy on this one. We’ve been doing this show together for two years now and we’ve only had a few calls in all that time. The first one was my mum, on my first show. But even she stopped listening after a week or two. After that it was just the odd pot smoker up late requesting ‘Dark Side of the Moon’. I’d tested Andy’s theory, that no one ever listened, a couple of times by asking a trivia question and offering an old cassingle as a prize. Someone always called up and answered the question and then got shirty ‘cause I wouldn’t post the cassingle to them – they had to come to the station and pick it up. Don’t they know I don’t get paid to do this job, unless you count unemployment benefits?
‘Someone could break in here and hack us to bits with a cleaver and we could be yelling out a detailed commentary as it happened until the air goes dead when they smash the blood-soaked panel to smithereens and no one would come and save us because no one is listening.’ Andy says from the couch.
Sometimes I hate Andy. For one thing he always programs these long Nine Inch Nails songs that make my ears want to puke, and for another he has a knack for giving voice to these things that happen to me in my sleep at night. In truth, the only reason I keep him on the show is because I feel a bit safer with someone else around.
‘Or, one night, if you don’t shut up about ‘Hey Jude’ maybe I might be the one to come in here with a cleaver.’
Andy thinks he is hilarious.
But, seriously, can he read my mind? I’m trying not to feel paranoid, but it is getting harder.
The phone rings again and Andy springs up from the couch, sending up another storm of spores, and grabs it before I can get to it.
‘Hello, 89.9 Community Radio, I’m listening.’ Andy says the last bit in a spooky voice, the kind of voice you use in grade five to scare the girls during a séance.
‘Shut up, Andy,’ I say, snatching the phone from him. I queue up the next track – ‘Ingrid Bergman’ by Billy Bragg – and speak to the caller.
‘Hello, caller?’
‘He’s right you know, I could hack you up and no one would know. Not even your mother listens to this show.’
I check the panel – mics are off. This guy, whoever he was, couldn’t possibly have heard us. We are in a sound-proof studio for fucks’ sake. And anyway, that thing about my mother…I’d only been thinking that, hadn’t I?
‘Who are you?’
I flick my eyes up to Andy, now resting his head on the panel looking lazier than ever – maybe he’d set up one of his loser mates to spook me. I kick him under the desk and he looks up at me. His face shows nothing; no glimmer of a smirk, but no fear either. In fact he looks strangely wax-like.
As Billy spins around, I wait for the caller to answer me.
He hangs up.
‘Alright, so who’ve you set up to call?’
‘What’re you talking about? I didn’t do that.’
As much as I don’t want to, I believe Andy. I know his faces – all three of them – and the one he has on now is his ‘I don’t really give a fuck’ face (incidentally, his most common face). That face doesn’t lie, because Andy genuinely doesn’t give a fuck about most things. He’s gone back to playing with his phone – another thing that pisses me off about him. We’re supposed to be working.
Billy Bragg is winding up (he’s always short and sweet) so I queue up the next track: Martha Wainwright. I just shove it in and hit play. It is unlike me to not carefully select a track and announce it. It’s fair to say I’m freaked out.
I look down at the panel to check the sound levels – sometimes Martha needs to be turned up – and see a liquid pooling at the edge of the desk. It is tan, syrupy and, yes, it smells. Bad. Like days old veggie scraps. The liquid spreads, oozing down into the cracks of the panel. I look up at Andy, and he is still fiddling with his phone, oblivious and waxy.
‘Andy?’ I say, as Martha croons around us.
Andy looks up at me and then pointedly fixes his eyes on his elbows and I can see that he is in fact the tan-coloured sludge. It is dripping off him and pooling around his elbows where he’s leaned them on the desk. It is running from his elbows and into the panel.
Andy’s wax-face has changed. This is not an Andy face I know. It is melting, softly drooping downwards towards his neck. To my horror, his neck is pooling around his chest. His chest is starting to look concave as things slip further and further south.
Grabbing my old windcheater, I use it to mop up the mess, soaking Andy into the fibres as Martha becomes prickly and fuzzy. The panel is dying, I can’t mop him up fast enough.
‘Andy, help me! At least get your elbows off the desk! Can’t you see what’s happening?’
I drop the windcheater – it’s soaked and useless anyway – and it falls, laden with Andy, to the floor. Andy begins to seep into the coarse fibres of the studio carpet and become indistinguishable from the rest of the dirt that has been trodden into it for decades before us. I panic. I don’t want Andy to vanish into the floor – how would I ever get him back again? I rip some old laminated posters from the walls – Beck from his Loser days and Regurgitator in their Unit era – and put them underneath the windcheater so that Andy can coagulate on the laminate.
It works. I begin to see parts of him forming over the poster images. Unit was a good choice – the yellow album cover is a clear backdrop and I see parts of Andy against it.
Martha has stopped and there is dead air all around. It has probably been like that for ages. I do the only thing I can: take a mic, turn it on and start a commentary.
‘Ah, sorry for the dead air folks, but the strangest thing just happened. My colleague Andy just melted into the panel. I mopped him up with my windcheater, and when he was all gone, I threw my windcheater onto the floor. He started to… hell! He’s coming back! It’s okay, folks! I can see him taking shape again. It’s starting at the floor, with his shoes. It’s slow, but it’s happening! He’s going to be okay! Andy! Can you hear me mate?’
The phone panel lights up. I pick up Line 1.
‘Jimmy, your mum called me. We’re putting the plan into action. What’s going on there?’
It is Michelle, the station manager.
‘Michelle!’
How much did she hear? Was she listening? It was a train wreck, even for the graveyard shift, one hellava train wreck.
‘Jimmy…’ her voice holds a warning. ‘You’re still on air. Queue up a track and turn off the mics.’
I do as she says, then go back to the phone.
‘All set, Michelle. It’s the strangest thing, first there was this call from a guy, he seemed to be reading my mind, and then Andy – ’
‘Jimmy. I’m sending around some people. They are going to help you. Just stay where you are, okay. Promise me you will stay where you are?’
‘Sure, there’s still twenty minutes of the show left, I
’m not deserting my post! But wait ‘til you hear about Andy – ’
‘Jimmy, Andy hasn’t been around for over three years.’ Michelle’s voice is very calm and soothing. Maybe she just woke up. ‘Since before you joined the station. Remember you told me in your interview that if Andy came back I was to call the police? That Andy messed with your head, that you hadn’t heard from him for a long time, but that he might come back someday? And that if he did…?’
‘If he did?’
I don’t want to think about what Michelle is saying. But Andy is back, she’s right.
‘The ambulance will be there any minute, Jimmy, just hold tight. While we wait, why don’t you queue up the emergency tape? I’ll walk you through it if you like. We wouldn’t want dead air, would we?’
Michelle is right, of course. But I don’t need to be told what to do. I know the procedure. I quickly set up the tape.
‘Good job, Jimmy. Now, can you leave the studio and walk to the front doors. But stay inside until the ambulance comes.’
‘What about Andy? I can’t just leave him alone on the floor. Maybe they can help him? The ambulance people?’
‘Andy will be just fine, you said he was coming back, didn’t you? He will be just fine.’
‘I think it was the spores from the couch, you should get that replaced.’
‘Yes, you’re right, it’s a terrible couch. Now, put the phone down and walk to the front, but stay inside until the ambulance comes, okay?’
I do as Michelle instructs. She is very calm and her voice is soothing, and as soon as I leave the sound-proofed studio I can hear the sirens.
I lie on the gurney in the ambulance as they ask me questions.
‘Name please?’ the paramedic asks.
‘Jimmy Absolom.’
‘Address?’
‘Unit 8, number 1, Plane Tree Drive.’
‘Suburb?’
They continue to ask questions and I continue to answer, but as I am talking what I am really thinking about is what Michelle had said about Andy. He did always manage to pull himself back together. If it takes him a while to soak out of the carpet and onto the Regurgitator poster and reform into his Nine Inch Nails loving self, well, that isn’t such a bad thing. We can do with some time apart.
Plane Tree Drive Page 4