by David Cohen
The offices of ALP (Authentic Landscape Productions) were located at a sprawling business park in Glen Waverley. About ten other applicants were waiting in the reception area. Roland, who turned out to be the personnel coordinator, eventually appeared and requested that we follow him. I was struck by his carefully tailored sideburns, which extended almost to the edges of his mouth, like strips of black gaffer tape sculpted with nail scissors and then stuck on to either jaw. He led us down a silent corridor, into a conference room with a large wall-mounted projector screen, a small table-mounted digital projector, and several rows of plastic chairs.
‘Grab a seat,’ said Roland. ‘We’ll get started in a moment.’
He left us to talk among ourselves, returning five minutes later with a slim, compact woman holding an equally slim and compact mobile phone. She wore a dark business suit with sharp shoulder pads. It made her look vaguely triangular, like a modest slice of pie chart.
‘This is Amanda Cheng,’ said Roland, ‘one of our senior supervisors.’
Amanda Cheng regarded us for a few moments, then asked, ‘Can anyone tell me what really attracts tourists to the Gibson Ranges?’
After an awkward silence someone ventured, ‘The timeless beauty of the forest.’ Obviously they’d been studying the brochure.
‘True,’ Amanda agreed. ‘But I’ll tell you what’s more important: people. The forest is brilliant, fantastic, but it’s the locals the tourists really get a buzz out of. You should see the looks on their faces as the train passes by and the locals wave. They all talk about how the locals wave. They love it. Can’t get enough. Problem is, the locals don’t wave anymore. Why? Because there are no locals anymore. Haven’t been any for ages. Why? That’s not our area of concern. So what is our area of concern then? What is your area of concern? Where exactly do you fit into this picture?’
Roland stood up and took over without missing a beat, as if the spiel were a choreographed duet, refined to perfection.
‘Now, you might think to yourself,’ he began, ‘that standing there and waving to a train as it goes by is pretty bloody simple. Right?’ He paused. We made vaguely affirmative gestures. Triumphant, Roland pointed at us and exclaimed, ‘Wrong! You’ve literally got to be part of the landscape, as if you’ve lived there all your life. Sightseers aren’t stupid.’ In the background, Amanda Cheng nodded.
‘What we’re going to do now,’ continued Roland, ‘is a little exercise, okay?’ He dimmed the lights and fired up the projector. What appeared on the screen was not a training video, but a train: footage of the Stringybark Express, an old locomotive that took visitors on scenic tours through the Gibson Ranges. The Stringybark Express had been an integral part of my childhood trips there. Even back then it looked like it had been clattering around that ten-kilometre circuit since the advent of steam power.
Roland instructed us to get up in turn and wave at the image of the Stringybark Express chugging along, as if we were waving at the real thing. In addition, each of us had to play the part of a local type, and the manner of waving had to suit that character. Roland appointed the roles, which ranged from birdwatchers to ferals to gold prospectors. Some people didn’t have a clue and overacted shamelessly. Roland and Amanda made notes and maintained poker faces.
I was one of the last to be called up. I had to play, of all things, a woodcutter. ‘However,’ said Roland, ‘you are in no way a symbol of environmental terrorism. You are a tree-friendly, self-sufficient type – a bit of a recluse maybe – gathering firewood.’
Having digested this, I waited for Roland’s signal and then extended my right arm in a no-nonsense woodcutter’s salute, improvising a friendly nod. I was no Laurence Olivier but I thought I did okay, and I noticed a whisper pass between senior supervisor and personnel coordinator.
In the end I was selected, along with three others, to join ALP’s Gibson Ranges unit. At 7.30 the following Saturday morning, we congregated in the car park outside the Glen Waverley headquarters. There was a sense of anticipation as we piled in to Roland’s Nissan Pathfinder and headed east. We talked and joked. I learned that two of my new co-workers had also recently left office jobs.
It took about an hour to get there. We were then dropped off in turn at what Roland called the principal contact points along the train’s route. My post was under a massive gum tree. I was to continue with my woodcutter role, and had already been fitted out with a cap and goggles, dirty overalls, a lumberjack shirt and boots. Roland handed me a chainsaw – the small, non-threatening type. ‘Okay, mate,’ he explained, ‘when the train comes, act as if you’re about to cut this branch.’ He attached a small but clearly visible strip of blue tape to a limb. ‘You won’t actually have to cut it because you’ll be waving. Right?’ He handed me a train schedule with the relevant times circled. ‘The Express leaves from Silver Creek station and passes here at these times. When it comes back the other way, be at that tree directly opposite, on other side of the track there, just to balance things out. Remember: wave until the last compartment has gone by. Break a leg!’
For someone who had spent virtually no time in the wilderness, I slipped into the role surprisingly easily. I heard the whistle in the distance, switched on the chainsaw and held it above the marked branch just as the Stringybark Express appeared around the bend. The train had seemed enormous when I was eight years old, but now, with its chain of tiny open carriages, it reminded me of the rides at Luna Park.
As the first carriage went by, I paused in the middle of my pretend-sawing, looked up as if only just noticing the train, and started waving with my free hand. It was incredible: a forest of outstretched arms returned my wave; rows of faces smiled and called out greetings; innumerable iPhones recorded my performance. I would be viewed on screens small and large throughout Asia, Europe, New Zealand!
I repeated the act every forty-five minutes until the Stringybark Express made its final circuit at five o’clock. I returned home exhausted but elated, eager to be a woodcutter again the following day.
It was the height of the tourist season and the Express ran every day, so I had regular work for the next few months. The pay was nothing special but it didn’t matter. I enjoyed being part of a dedicated team, and I soon felt very much at home in the forest. Between trains my time was my own, and as I couldn’t really go anywhere, I learned to appreciate the landscape. Unseasonably heavy rains had left the soil moist and cool. I breathed in its rich smell and contemplated the towering eucalypts.
But most of all, I loved performing. I looked forward to my fleeting contact with each new trainload of tourists. I felt lonely when the Express puffed around the bend and out of sight, but brightened up at the thought of its return. For perhaps the first time in my life, I felt a genuine sense of purpose.
The only cloud in my sky was a persistent rumour that the Stringybark Express might soon be taken out of service, permanently. According to the woman in our team who played an eccentric ornithologist, the train itself still ran as efficiently as ever, but there were concerns that the old wooden bridge it had to cross halfway through the circuit was no longer structurally sound.
‘They can’t fix it – it’ll have to be completely rebuilt,’ she explained at one of our weekly acting workshops. ‘But the government has no intention of doing it just for the sake of a sightseeing train. They want to consign the Express to a railway museum, so people can still look at it or maybe even sit in it. That’s all very well, but it means we can kiss our jobs goodbye.’
Roland played down these rumours, assuring us that the bridge was perfectly safe and the train would continue to run. Amanda Cheng herself rode the train now and then when compiling our evaluation reports. She would disguise herself as a tourist and monitor everyone’s work. It was important that our performances didn’t become wooden, so to speak.
To get into the character more, between trains I started walking deeper into the forest and cutting the odd small branch. Roland had never actually said I couldn’t. The tr
uth was that I was dying to cut wood, rather than just pretend. Then, as I grew accustomed to it, I sliced off thicker limbs, enjoying the feel of the chainsaw. By the end of each day my hands were crisscrossed with cuts and scratches, the creases in my skin dirt-filled, and I was covered in wood shavings, which I brushed off before Roland came to pick me up. I felt like I was doing real work. My back, arms and shoulders ached in a refreshingly honest way. The vice had relaxed its grip on my skull.
I liked the chainsaw so much that I used a month’s pay to buy one for myself, and began cutting branches in my parents’ backyard. My mother was grateful but she still went on at me for, as she put it, wasting my brain.
‘You could be a successful barrister, you know!’ she exclaimed. My mother exclaimed a lot. Sometimes she shouted. Other times she yelled. According to the dictates of circumstance, she switched from exclaiming to shouting, from shouting to yelling, from yelling back to exclaiming.
‘Why this fixation with lawyers?’ I said. ‘Why would I want to be one? For that matter, why would anybody?’
‘You have so much talent! You could be anything!’
‘I am something.’
‘You can’t do that for the rest of your life! And stop revving that chainsaw, it’s giving me a headache!’
Naturally, I couldn’t wait to go to work, watching through the window of Roland’s SUV as self-storage facilities and shopping malls gave way to wooden sheds and long stretches of green wilderness. When I slipped into my overalls and took my position in the forest, chainsaw in hand, I felt like I had slipped back into the real me. Returning home at night was the worst. As I walked through the city, people looked at me as if I were a serial killer. The irony was, the real serial killers always looked like lawyers.
My mother objected to me wearing my overalls and boots around the house all the time. She said it embarrassed her when her friends came to play bridge. They sat there telling each other about their children. This one was studying, this one had her degree and was now a dentist, a software engineer, a marketing strategist. Some were engaged, some married. Some – younger than me, even – had children. They looked up from their cards as I walked by with my chainsaw. ‘He’s in tourism,’ said my mother.
I carried the saw around with me most of the time, switching it on regularly, just for the feel of the vibrating blade, the sharp petroleum smell, the motorised growl. My mother despised it. Dad didn’t have to put up with it so much since he was seldom home. My sister, halfway through her first year of an arts degree, informed me that the chainsaw was a phallocratic tool. I went outside looking for branches to cut, but there were none left in our garden. I couldn’t wait for them to grow back, so I cut the tree trunks. My mother screamed at me. All I wanted to do was get back to the forest. I’d told Roland I was available for work seven days a week, but with winter fast approaching, the Stringybark Express was running far less frequently.
One day I came home and my chainsaw was missing from the back shed. I turned the house upside down. When my mother returned I was standing in the driveway.
‘Where the hell is it?’ I said.
‘Where’s what?’ she said, walking past me.
‘You know very well!’
‘You mean that machine of yours? Don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe.’
I noticed that for once she wasn’t exclaiming, or shouting, or yelling. She spoke slowly and calmly, like a therapist of some sort.
‘I want to know where it is!’
‘Look,’ she said, her voice edging its way to a more familiar pitch, ‘I’d had enough of that damned thing. In fact, your father and I both think you were developing an unhealthy attachment to it. Your sister agrees with us. And she’s studying psychology.’
I grabbed my car keys. I had a pretty good idea where the chainsaw was. More than once she’d threatened to hock it when I wasn’t around; I’d just never believed she’d have the nerve. I checked out a few Cash Converters stores and before long I found it. I had to buy back my own chainsaw.
‘Next time,’ I said to my mother, ‘I’ll carve up the garden furniture.’
The following morning I arrived early at ALP’s headquarters. Roland was already there. Before I could open my mouth he said, ‘Glad you’re here, mate. Amanda and I would like a word.’
I followed him into Amanda Cheng’s office.
‘I want you to look at these,’ said Amanda. She produced a stack of photographs from her desk drawer and spread them over the desk as if performing a card trick. They were photographs of me, cutting trees in the forest.
‘What’s the story here?’ she said.
‘Nothing, really,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to do some real woodcutting. It’s just branches. I wasn’t felling trees or anything. People might have noticed.’ I laughed self-consciously.
Roland perched himself on the edge of the desk. ‘That’s not the point, mate. We didn’t employ you to do that. Our contract with the Tourist Commission stipulates that we – that’s you or any other team member – don’t interfere with the forest. We play our roles. That’s it.’
‘But I’m not hurting anyone. I’m just a simple woodcutter.’
‘That’s the problem,’ said Roland. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant.
‘You see, as far as we’re concerned, it’s no biggie,’ Amanda said. ‘But it’s not up to us.’
‘Sorry, mate.’ Roland placed a hand on my shoulder. ‘And don’t take it as a reflection on your work. You were one of the better ones.’
He walked me back out into the reception area, where the others, wondering what was causing the delay, had congregated. ‘Let’s get this show on the road, people!’ he bellowed, clapping his hands together. He obviously wasn’t one for long goodbyes.
By that stage I didn’t care. In fact, this was better. There were no longer any restrictions on me. I could live right there in the forest, cut wood, and damn well carry on waving to the tourists whether anyone liked it or not. I didn’t need the money; as far as that was concerned I could earn almost as much on the dole. I made up my mind to stay in the woods and survive alone.
It happened one rainy afternoon a month or so later. The Stringybark Express had almost made its way across the old bridge when the rotting wood gave way and the train’s two end carriages plunged into the valley. Only one of those carriages was occupied, and it contained just two passengers: a Japanese couple on their honeymoon. The days of the Stringybark Express were well and truly over.
The other carriage is now my home. It lies more or less where it landed. Using logs I cut with my own two hands, I replaced the broken roof beams and boarded up the open sides through which the passengers once waved. It still keeps the rain out.
Although the train doesn’t run anymore, you still get plenty of visitors to the Gibson Ranges, but mainly those who shun organised tours. These people, I’ve noticed, come in three basic categories. There are the nature lovers and dreadlocked environmentalists, drawn to the magic of the landscape. There are the ghoulish types who want to see where the train disaster took place. But most peculiar of all is group number three: that curious handful who make the journey because of me. I’ve become something of an attraction in my own right, a kind of local myth, spread by word of mouth. I’m known as the Mad Woodsman. They come up here hoping to get a glimpse.
CARLOS
Carlos, who used to work with us in Customer Service, had this really distinctive laugh – a loud, prolonged, and basically quite maniacal laugh. Interesting, in a way, when you think about what happened to him.
Carlos’s laugh was so distinctive that one day, a couple of weeks after he left, I started imitating it. Rex heard me, and he started imitating it too. We competed with each other to see who could do the best Carlos laugh. Then Fergus got in on the act, and before long there were about ten of us, including one of the supervisors.
Hardly a day went by without at least two of us laughing like Carlos. Naturally, this made us think about what happened to
him. But we tried to focus on the laugh. Most people have different ways of laughing, depending on the situation, but Carlos laughed the same way every time, regardless of the situation, regardless of how funny the situation was, or even if the situation wasn’t funny at all.
Some customers overheard us imitating Carlos’s laugh. We weren’t aware of that until Gail, the branch manager, brought it up in a staff meeting. She said that not only was our behaviour unprofessional, it was also insulting to Carlos, in light of what happened to him.
So now we do it in the storage room every Friday morning. We’ve formalised the process so that it’s conducted according to pretty strict rules. Each person presents their laugh in turn for a maximum of thirty seconds. When everyone has presented, Judy, who doesn’t take part in the contest but is very familiar with Carlos’s laugh, picks the most convincing performance, and we record the result on a scoresheet pinned to the noticeboard. We all put in a dollar every week, and whoever has the most points by December will get some wine, or possibly a gift voucher. Right now I’m third, Fergus is fourth and Rex is second. Rex used to be first, but then Sonia came along and outdid us all – pretty impressive, considering she has a naturally high-pitched voice.
Even so, I think I have it in me to beat both Rex and Sonia. I work on my laugh in my own time and I assume the others do too, because the overall standard is much higher than it was in the early days.
But no matter how proficient any of us becomes at doing the laugh, none of us will ever be able to do it exactly like Carlos, which makes sense, really, because when you get right down to it, only Carlos can laugh exactly like Carlos. It’s a pity that he’s no longer around to do the laugh. Because of what happened, we won’t be hearing it again.
