by Tim Richards
Did the people who chose him make the choice because they saw in him a potential for murder? These thoughts made the boy dizzy, and still the fat man continued to bait him.
‘Do any of the girls in class remind you of your mum?’ Higgs asked.
Raymond couldn’t say. He hadn’t thought about it.
‘One of them is your mum, or grandma, isn’t she, Ray? You saw photos of your mum as a girl, and they excited you, didn’t they?’
The boy from the future said that only a sick man could impute those motives. Ray had come a long way. His mission was entirely honourable.
‘What if I said that you’re just a retrograde virus from the future, a filthy little motherfucker?’
Rather than punch Higgs, Raymond laughed out loud. The man was pathetic. Good for no more than giving parking tickets to aliens.
‘Whatever you think is immaterial, Mr Higgs. Events will take their course. Whether the next thing is trivial or crucial, one thing’s for sure. It’s all been factored in.’
A Town Called Hypothesis
Over a period of three or four days, local speculations bred like hungry locusts.
Raymond was an assassin.
Raymond was a sacrificial lamb. His tragic death would draw attention to a person whose historic trajectory needed to be changed.
Raymond was a lost schizophrenic. His thinking was being distorted by an acute anxiety-depression.
Raymond was here to have sex with one or many local women in order to found a religious cult with controlled bloodlines.
Raymond was here to foil the sexual coupling of a man and woman who were destined to produce dangerous issue.
Raymond was here on a personal mission to leave behind evidence of a pre-history sufficient to establish his future claims to be a god-head.
Raymond was a vagrant who told a strange story convincingly well.
Raymond was the Son of God.
Raymond was Satan incarnate.
Raymond was a personified force of entropy.
Raymond should be prevented from doing anything.
Preventing Raymond from doing anything would only satisfy whatever expectation the future had of the past.
Raymond was an unnecessary distraction.
Raymond should be given carte blanche to do whatever he had to do.
Raymond should be tortured unmercifully to discourage the future from meddling with God’s plan.
Raymond should be hypnotised to see whether he carried useful knowledge with regard to precious metal deposits, or future agricultural practices.
Raymond should be treated just like you’d want your own children to be treated if they were stranded in a far-off country.
Uncertainties
Ray would recall wandering down a rusty track separating luminous fields of canola, and feeling sad with regard to a recent episode.
He’d been visiting Jodi Everett at her dad’s farm. While her parents had gone off to see their business partners, she had taken him into her bedroom to listen to music. He found Jodi’s music less captivating than her boundless enthusiasm for it. The bassline pulled at his stomach.
‘You can only really understand this music if you take drugs,’ Jodi told him, and Ray would happily have shared drugs with her, but she had none.
He remembered feeling uncertain about what she might expect from him. He didn’t know Jodi well, but he liked her, and she was pretty. Ray wanted to kiss her, and to be wanted by her, but her overt friendliness seemed forced. Out of character. As Ray lay on her bed, examining the cover of a compact disc, Jodi stretched to kiss him gently on the lips.
Even before he could register this, and invite her to join him in a passionate embrace, the girl was above him, taking off her T-shirt. Jodi’s body was young, and beautifully proportioned – but she was trembling uncontrollably and not far off tears, despite her earnest attempts to smile.
Ray couldn’t remember exactly what he said next, or why he’d chosen to deny her what they both wanted. He might have said something about wanting to, but needing to remember that a stronger force was guiding him. Even as he said this, he knew that he was making excuses for his own confusion.
This was a girl Ray should have been able to love wholeheartedly, but all he’d done was confuse and embarrass her.
Covering her breasts with her arms, Jodi told Ray to leave. Even as he backed out of the room, he felt that he’d seen her face, that expression, those exact same tears, somewhere before. And he could have killed himself for not embracing Jodi and trying to comfort her.
He was walking aimlessly down the dirt track, trying to make sense of his true motives and desires, when he met Gavin McGibbon riding his bike in the opposite direction. When Ray said Hi to Gavin, the local boy dropped an abrupt broadie.
‘You recognise me, don’t you?’ Gavin asked.
‘From school.’
‘Before that, or since then. However you want to put it. We know each other.’
Ray knew nothing of the sort.
Gavin was certain that Ray must know about the terms of his agency. He said that Ray had been sent back to perform an assassination. He’d been asked to kill Gavin before he fucked Jodi. And Gavin refused to believe the boy from the future when he said that he’d been given no precise mission.
‘The thing is,’ Gavin told him. ‘I don’t give a fuck how badly the history of this planet turns out, and I’m certainly not going to stand back and let you do whatever you want to me or Jode. I’m not going to kill you, Ray, I’m going to annul you. I’ve got you factored in.’
Raymond remembered a struggle over the knife, the fierce determination on Gavin’s face, a punch in the gut that might have been a stab wound. He remembered thinking that Gavin was the dragon he had to slay.
The two boys from the future were grappling for control of the knife when Ray woke in a sweaty panic. Collecting the details of this dream did nothing to relieve his confusion.
Ray was a vagrant in time. This new life, for all true intents and purposes, was aimless. Although he desperately wanted to believe in Allah’s will, Ray could no longer feel certain he was an agent of that will.
The Dragon Slays Himself
Bob Higgs was never going to admit his impotence to Jack Carr or Mrs Peng. Dealing with aliens had taught him that sometimes it’s best to bluff and draw things out, to let events take their course before claiming credit for the result. The best possible outcome.
When caught in a tricky situation, an experienced practitioner will float the need for random, apparently irrational measures designed to suggest that only he knows how to save Mintook from the worst-case ramifications of having a motherfucker in its midst.
Higgs instructed Jack Carr to close down the local bakery on Thursdays. He told Mrs Peng to introduce a prayer before each class. Rear-angle parking should be immediately replaced by parallel parking.
He insisted that the boy from the future be sniffed by Ted Anguin’s border collie every morning. Dogs were unusually sensitive to a scent of life beyond their own deaths. Ted’s dog would go rabid if Ray was on the verge of annulling himself.
To Mrs Peng, Bob confided an absolute certainty that Ray knew far more than he’d been letting on. His claim that interventions were irrevocably factored-in was a bluff.
When the woman lamented that they couldn’t know whether they were doing more harm than good, Higgs assured her that they would always know what they felt in their hearts. Intentions counted.
As the pair were discussing the utility of putting Ray on a strict chicken and rice diet, Jack Carr and a young constable arrived with news that Jodi Everett was missing. Her window was open, and her bed hadn’t been slept in. The most recent entry in the girl’s diary expressed a desire to have a child by the boy from the future.
Carr wanted Higgs to get a search team sent up from Melbourne, but the big man was curiously unmoved by the inspector’s distress.
‘I wouldn’t bother,’ he told Carr. ‘You’ll find her
soon enough.
He will vaporise before he can hide the body.’
‘You reckon he’s killed her?’
‘Nothing more certain. Fucked her, then left her to rot. When you DNA-test the semen, you’ll find that the Everett girl was Raymond’s mum.’
Mrs Peng couldn’t make it to the door before a stream of vomit forced its way through her fingers. Not even this shook the consultant’s calm. Everything Higgs first predicted had come to fruition.
‘Sickest way to commit suicide. Scouring time for a way to annul yourself … But that’s the terrorist mentality. They resent the fact that our values are enduring values.’
Higgs shook the inspector by the hand. He was sorry things had turned out the way they had, but there was nothing they could have done. This stuff happened a lot more often than you heard about.
The expert from Melbourne rubbed the distraught principal’s shoulder and told her not to blame herself. At least one thing Ray said was true. Everything was factored in. Ray’s intervention turned each of them into unwitting agents. Now it was time for Bob Higgs to get back to his family. He asked Mrs Peng to pass on his regards to Mr Peng and the boys.
While these farewells were being exchanged, Catherine O’Shaunessy, editor of the Mintook Times, burst into the lounge. She had excellent news. Jodi Everett was safe and well. After deciding not to give her virginity to Ray, she’d spent the night in the cemetery. She was cold and hungry. More embarrassed than anything.
Embarrassments gathered like a storm.
Just after lunch, Bob Higgs checked out of the Railway Hotel, directing his Statesman towards the affluent eastern suburbs of the state capital. In their subsequent conversations, neither Jack Carr nor Mrs Peng ever mentioned Bob Higgs or the consultant’s outrageous fee.
Waiting
Mintook’s harvest that year was a clinker, and twenty-three Year Twelve students were offered university places. After two years of solid toiling, Narelle Tyler became pregnant. Despite this, she and Kim were keen for Ray to stay on as their guest. The boy from the future had a sweet manner and made friends easily. Dogs were especially fond of him. Ray could master even the most unruly mutt.
Raymond proved to be an intelligent, attentive student with a predictable interest in history. Even with so much doubt surrounding the length of his stay, the boy hoped to win a scholarship to continue his studies beyond Year Twelve.
The young men who might have found Ray to be an insuperable foe were finally won over by his capacity to tell a killer yarn. Ray’s stories were several shades bluer than anything heard in Mintook, and his audience left it for Ray to judge whether speaking such filth conflicted with his regular vague references to Allah.
But it was as a cricketer that Ray really made his mark. Blessed with elastic wrists, the bat was a wand in his hands. As the boy from the future chalked up a succession of massive scores, observers surmised that Ray must have been privy to sophisticated coaching. Few believed him when he said he’d never heard of cricket before.
So huge was his love of this game, Ray began to hope that his mission was to save cricket from extinction. So far as the newcomer could gather, cricket was all about marshalling the forces of time: a game of patience and opportunism.
Once the initial excitement wore off, girls were less brazen in their attempts to win Ray’s attention. They came to think of him as the local cricket star first, visitor from another time and harbinger of destiny second.
Although Jodi and the boy from the future soon became thought of as an item, Jodi made no more nocturnal flights, and declared herself in no rush to surrender her ‘virtue’. Knowing too well what these declarations meant in local terms, Kim Tyler made sure that Ray had condoms to safeguard against a moment when present and future might conspire to merge rather too dramatically.
At first, everyone waited, but gradually the people of Mintook began to think of Ray as one of destiny’s many agents rather than time’s ultimate cannibal. Newspapers were printed, bread was baked, buses were caught and missed. Children were born, old people died, and the McGibbon family shifted back to Melbourne. If Mintook’s boy from the future was going to evaporate, he’d do so when the time suited and not before. After cricket’s grand final, hopefully.
Even Mrs Peng began to think of Ray as just another boy in whites who cycled down her street on his way to the cricket ground every Saturday. Such assimilations were pretty much her experience of life in the towns around Koorook. Outsiders came, and they were a big deal for a while. You often wondered what they thought this place could possibly offer them, or how the town would ever learn to put up with them. Violent conflict seemed inevitable. Then, when the sun rose one day, it was as if they’d always been there, hand-picked for the town by some greater force of necessity.
INTERMITTENT RED FLASHES
Rant #1
The worst thing about this third-rate era we’re consigned to is the way people are always inviting you to be impressed. Collie has a spot on MySpace where he invents axioms, publishes dog photos and blogs on about fuck-all, and you’re meant to be in awe of the ten thousand hits he had last month. Of course, he never actually says ‘You should be impressed,’ but that’s what’s implied by him spouting shit so laconically.
Ten thousand hits is new-world impressive. Old-world success doesn’t cut it any more. Collie forgets that you used to work for television. No one saw your face, or knew your dog’s name, but actors gave life to your words and, some weeks, two million viewers tuned in. Television used to matter the way the Net does now, but the trick was the same, to impress people without showing you need them to be impressed. To win respect without telling the world that you are a raving, fucked-up narcissist.
Stretching the Happiness Muscles
Doctor Long hates you because you call her Doctor when a specialist wants to be addressed as ‘Emma’ or ‘Miz’. But even with your libido nudging zero, which it has all this decade – the entire Howard era in fact – you still get the hots for Doctor Long. She has flaming red hair and says ‘mmm’ like a babe at the nipple, and her so-right glasses make her look like Solomon’s wiser sister.
She’s smart enough to skip talk-cures and get you the stuff that’s been jollying Swiss lab-rats.
‘Mellovex is stronger than the medications you’ve been taking, but it should have a pronounced impact on your wellbeing. My main concern at this time is to shift the chemical mix so that you can feel happier. Otherwise, your happiness muscles will go to waste.’
‘Shit. I hadn’t thought to worry about them.’
‘You may notice a tendency to obsess about things, and to get a little … hyper.’
‘Nothing that makes me ecstatic. I have to be able to write.’
‘This should be fine for that. Make sure to read the instructions on the packet, and never take Mellovex in conjunction with alcohol. If it doesn’t suit, let me know.’
Puzzling Responses
It usually takes a month to do a ten-thousand-piece jigsaw. When you started Bruegel’s Icarus, you were going through a bad patch, and that took six weeks. But once the Mellovex kicks in, you have three puzzles on the go at the same time, and take eight days to finish a twenty-thousand-piece red and gold Rothko.
All the stuff you never notice suddenly becomes obvious, like the exact number of active pixels on your television screen, and the number of bricks that went into constructing your living room. When you’re given the key to a world of amazements, you have to share that joy with people who matter, so you get Miranda on the blower and tell her how fucking immense the world is, and how you could go some rock ’n’ roll if she’s up for it, which must come as a shock, given the way she stresses that you haven’t seen her for twelve years. Not since Keating was PM.
‘I’m on a new medication, and it’s fantastic.’
‘Sounds like you’re on a new planet.’
‘C’mon, a quick one for old times. I’ll count your freckles.’
‘No. When I want
ed them counted, you weren’t interested.’
Would You By Chance Have Some Spare Milk?
Work? You can’t keep up with the words spilling from your head, and this new work is like nothing you’ve written before. All the old themes are there, but the sentences have rhythm and cadence. You’d pause to admire them, only there’s a new sentence waiting to be recorded.
You are so caught up in the novelty of being productive that you don’t hear the movers at work in the neighbouring flat. But you hear the doorbell, and there you are – the unshaven, unwashed savant in a threadbare dressing gown – opposite two stunning brunettes: voluptuous Liz, with eyes and lips to die for, and her even more exceptional daughter, Sian, nine tiny freckles on her left cheek, eight perfect flecks on the right.
‘Would you by chance have some spare milk?’
‘You’re in luck. This is a shrine to long-life milk.’
Sian giggles, and if that’s the last sound you hear before dying, you’ll die a happy man.
An Everyday Use for Venn Diagrams
When Collie asks why you’re always so determined to pursue the wrong woman, you tell him to poll the readers of his blog, but the cur has set you thinking about the women you once imagined to be right. A detailed statistical analysis might have something to offer.
Of the twenty-nine women you’ve seen/dated/romanced over the past thirty-one years, a disproportionately high number (thirteen) have French given names, but no obvious patterns emerge from hair shade, eye colour or body type. You have certain abstract preferences, but when a woman with a pretty face and an interesting voice comes along, ideals vanish.
But statistics need to go deeper. So you come up with this new one about brothers. There’s barely been one. Those twenty-nine women have had forty-five sisters (that is, seventy-four female offspring in their families) but just twenty-three brothers, and only eight of the women in question had an elder brother. That’s got to mean something, but what? Are women from these female-dominant families more likely to be hyper-feminine, or to have been nurtured as if male? Did they find you attractive because they didn’t have older brothers to correct that tendency, or did they identify you as a man who might become a sister in a brotherly way? Having entered these affairs with eyes closed, you’ve now lost the chance to count freckles and hear what their skin has to say.