Telling Stories

by Geoff Palmer

  I was just about to go inside when he switched it off. The difference was so dramatic I thought I'd gone deaf. Then he started taking it to bits. You could tell he wasn't in a good mood because he kept swearing and kicking at things. He was still wearing boots, leather pants and leather jacket. That's all I've ever seen him in. I'm sure he must sleep in them too. His one concession to the day was that the jacket was unzipped.

  After a while the little blonde girl he lives with came down the drive to see how he was getting on. She brought him a cold beer but he just brushed it away; in fact he almost knocked it out of her hand. I thought what an odd couple they are. It doesn't make sense, really. He's grubby, coarse, foul-mouthed, practically monosyllabic and treats her like dirt, while she's always clean and smart, exchanges pleasantries with everyone she meets and is thoughtful enough to take him down a cold drink on a warm day. I think she's even got a job. There was his long, lank hair and the torn T-shirt underneath his leathers next to her manicured hands and painted toenails. Bizarre. Like chalk and cheese.

  It was getting rather late in the afternoon by that stage. The shadow of the block of flats was nipping at the corner of my garden and it wasn't so warm any more, but it looked as though a situation was developing so I kept an eye on them while pretending to read my book. I'm no voyeur or anything, but watching people can be fascinating. You can learn a lot from just watching. It was quite amusing too, seeing someone in such a shitty mood. I mean he was calling his spanners bastards and stuff like that. She was just standing there, holding this can of beer, watching as I was, and I think that was making him even madder. He'd started having some real trouble with a recalcitrant spark plug when he suddenly looked up and yelled, 'Fuck off, will ya!' I think it's the longest sentence I've ever heard him utter.

  She didn't say anything, just stooped to set the drink down and he stormed round the bike and stopped in front of her. As she came up — and she only comes up to his shoulder anyway — he yelled right in her face.

  'Fuck! Off!'

  She winced at each syllable as though he had bad breath — he probably does — and said quietly, 'I'm going.'

  To this he replied, 'Bitch!' and deliberately slammed the heel of his boot down on her foot. Not the flat of the heel either, the back edge. She was only wearing sandals.

  She didn't scream; her face showed a scream but no noise came out. She just kind of buckled up in slow motion, grasping her ankle. She hovered there for a couple of seconds then, probably realising she was still in danger, crawled away on her hands and one knee, holding her injured foot above the ground like a wounded dog. He glanced at her for a second, grunted, then turned back to the bike.

  I didn't know what to do for a moment, I was so shocked. If he'd done something like that to an animal I'd probably have killed him outright, but because it was a person I felt as though I was interfering in something private. For a moment I felt like sneaking inside and just leaving them to it. I mean, they are supposed to be adults. If he's going to act like that and she's going to put up with it, then let them get on with it, I reckon. But she was in a lot of pain. She slumped down on the grass beside the drive, on the other side of a clump of hydrangeas from him and practically opposite where I was sitting. She just sat there, her face all screwed up, tears running down her cheeks, rocking backwards and forwards and holding her ankle with white-knuckled hands, not daring to touch the foot itself.

  I'd seen the angle of the boot and the sharpness with which he brought it down. And she was just across the garden from me — looking up from my book I couldn't miss her — so after a bit more hesitation, during which the oik turned his back on us completely, I trotted over and asked if she was all right. I admit it was a pretty dumb thing to say because she obviously wasn't. Her foot was bleeding a little about halfway between the toes and ankle, and blood was clotting round the straps of her sandal so it looked a real mess. What a stupid species we are. She sat there rocking to and fro with her foot all mangled, face scrunched up with pain and sobbing, and I asked her if she was all right and she nodded yes, she was!

  Probably because I was there, she wiped the tears with the back of her hand and tried to make out she was okay. Using the fence for support, she got herself upright on her good leg. Hanging on to the palings, she even smiled apologetically at me before putting some weight on her injured foot. It was no good. Her face collapsed with the pain and I had to grab her elbow to stop her falling over.

  Just then someone shoved me in the back. I looked round and it was the oik, standing there in his rancid leathers. He shoved me again, saying, 'Fuck off. Leave her alone!' The cheek of it. Like I was responsible for her injuries.

  By now she'd taken hold of the fence again and I turned round fully, but he kept pushing me with the flat of his hand, yelling obscenities.

  'Fuck off, you fat bastard. Go on, fuck off.'

  I tried to say something in my defence but he just kept shoving me backwards, alternating from one greasy hand to the other. He looked pretty wild, as if he'd be capable of anything.

  I finally managed to back away enough to get out of reach and say something about how I was only trying to help — to which he yelled, 'Well, don't!' — then skirted round him and headed back up the drive. By the time I got inside I was cross and shaking.

  It was probably my own fault for getting involved; I should have left them to it. But it's not as if he went to help her or anything because about ten seconds later he was back swearing at his bike again. I must admit that last night I was still so mad about the whole business that I felt like going out there and setting light to the damn motorbike. That'd fix him.

  I really couldn't settle to anything after that. It left me feeling so upset and distracted that I had to go out for a walk to calm my nerves. I felt as though I was dodging snipers going down the driveway to the street, but once I was away from the house I began to feel better. I must have walked for miles. I ended up watching the sunset from the top of Mount Victory. It's fascinating looking down at the city through binoculars. When I got home it was quite dark.

  I don't know how the blonde girl got on, but I saw her crossing the road to the dairy this evening with her foot in plaster — not just bandages, actual plaster. She gave me the briefest of sheepish smiles before fixing her attention on the road surface. I guess with a foot in plaster you have to watch where you're going.

  View

  The onset of winter in Barchester Towers is indicated by the damp and perennially gloomy stairway that provides access to my bijou residence becoming damper and gloomier. The wind, when present, hones its lacerating edge, making the climb to my tower-top retreat less pleasant than ever.

  Actually, the view from up here is not all bad. At sunset the whole face of Mount Victory is bathed in an amber light, the whitewashed matchstick houses glowing warmly from the dark green vegetation and surrounding bush, each window returning a miniature sunset of its own. But even sunset in this city isn't real; just the loss of light from behind another range of ever-circling hills. The real plunge remains invisible except for a long, fading afterglow in the western sky, as if the sun itself had crashed and burned in some distant valley.

  And even this remains a mystery to some. From early afternoon the shadow of this behemoth slowly inches its way across lawns, gardens, streets and up the hillside, chilling sun-drenched cats, cooling passions and squashing flat the image of the houses in its path.

  It is one of my hobbies, one of my pleasures, to watch this inching progress up the hillside from the window of my lounge. I do so from the comfort of the desk where I have unwisely placed my typewriter; unwise because the ravishes of the view are frequently more alluring than the blankness of the paper that stares back at me. And besides, there's bugger all else to do on a Saturday afternoon.

  Exotic smells inch, too, in the indolent air. They inch along the verandah and through my open front/back door, prodding, tempting, surprising and teasing my sensitive proboscis with the mysteries of Eastern
cuisine from the kitchen of my Indian neighbours. No wonder the French disparage the English diet. Even our cooking processes are dull and flat; boil, stew, fry. Where's the sauté, the flambé, the baste? Some ancient Celt or Britain hurled a vigorous green vegetable into a pot, boiled it to a pallid, tasteless sludge and set the tradition by calling it dinner. Only the discovery of salt prevented the total atrophy of the Anglo-Saxon tastebud. Now what we boil out at one end we heap on at the other, ossifying arteries in between.

  Inching too is progress on my manuscript. (Novel is, as yet, too grand a term for the loose collection of scribbles, notes and doodles reclining like loose-leafed hunchbacks in an old shoebox.) A contemporary picaresque — a form too often overlooked and whose time must surely come again. Throw out your Dickens and your Thackeray! Drag down the Smollett and the Nash.

  Inch, inch, inch — the centimetre may be a tool for measurement but it has no place in literature — another house snuffed out and I can't keep my eyes on the page. The movement is accentuated now; the speed is almost palpable. As the angle declines, the momentum increases and binoculars are no longer necessary to watch the progress. There goes a vege patch, a garden path, three gnomes and their fishing pool. Now the corner of a carport. There's some sort of altercation going on down there; to the unaided eye it looks like a full stop being pushed into place by a comma. Who cares? In five minutes we'll have swallowed them and all their petty grievances. Gone. Into the realm of shadows.

  Time passes/passing/passed. Another cup of tea, a few more desultory key taps. It's hard to focus on the signature when the whole canvas begs attention. And still the shadows beckon. Quicker now, we're losing strength but spreading wide; the sun has almost gone. Hurry, hurry. Climb the hill as high, as fast as you can before we lose the light. It's going ... going ... fading ... fading ... dusk.

  The crash-and-burn will last a while yet as lights wink on to replace the glow. And down on the badly punctuated line of driveway — comma and full stop now gone in gloom — another glow, a tiny sun, a fragment, yellow, orange, flickers briefly at a carport corner. Binoculars reveal a sudden tiny dawn, a sudden tiny noon, pagan punctuations dancing round a fire at dusk. The drama of a short-lived sun collects the ants to bask in heat and light and spectacle, then a sudden tiny sunset. Crash-and-burn extinguished long before the sirens' wail wafts up.

  Even inching darkness doesn't help my script. The wink of yellow window lights in blackness, the warmth of orange street lamps, the icy cool of white. It's surprising how much detail still remains. And each uncurtained light reveals new depth and features that the daylight mostly hid. The rooms within each flat façade appear as islands now, connect-the- dots of life, bright constellations on the ground. There's kitchen bustle and party shuffle but mostly people slump, transfixed by televisions; vicarious living through another sort of window. And later, as lights wink to and fro, bedrooms, bathrooms now revealed, curtained colours snapped across. Still some undress in naked rooms and yellow glare, assuming rash protection from the view. And later still, as more wink out, the icy desolation of the streets beneath a cold and steely glare. A lurching drunk, a huddle of nervous girls, a solitary prowler lounging beneath a street lamp. And so the steady tick-tock of the night, slower now, more stately, more refined; clock hands creeping round and round, keeping the beat, marking the pace, segmenting the world into a steady march of seconds as we inch towards another bloody dawn.

  Thursday, April 16

  There is a certain monotony to my days, which, I suppose, is a way of saying I'm a creature of routine and habit. I don't know if that is necessarily a bad thing — I suppose we all are to a certain extent — but I've only recently come to realise that I've developed certain routines that are now almost rituals. Take 10:30-for-tea, for example. I always go at that time. In fact I play a little game with myself over it, keeping my eye on the clock till it reaches thirty seconds past 10:29 then counting off the remaining seconds to myself before standing up and looking at the clock again. The closer I get to the exact time, the better my break will be. Silly.

  Other people know my routines too. Invariably someone will say, 'Ten thirty, Spud's away,' as I get up to go. I play a similar game on the stairs coming back down, trying to time my last footfall to the second, and Fletcher almost always glances at his watch and nods at me to verify my return at ten to eleven. Writing them out like this, detailing them, makes them seem peculiar or bizarre, but this is the way my small world functions. Or did so up till now.

  The problem with routines is that any variations are quickly spotted. Coming back late gets noticed. Doing so twice prompts a comment and choosing a different lunch hour becomes a topic of conversation. Thus I am unwittingly undone. I have always tried to keep my private life to myself but my colleagues now suspect something is up, something has changed, something is going on. They are on the alert.

  Of course nothing has really changed, it's mostly in their minds. I've been late back a couple of times because I’ve run into Marie in the tea room and we've got talking. That's all. Just talk. And I took a later lunch today because something she said led me to suspect she might be eating upstairs instead of at her desk or going out. She didn't, I was wrong, so just had a later lunch than usual. It's no big deal.

  There's nothing in the conversations either. They might have seemed momentous at the time but now I can barely recall anything that's been said. Maybe the fact of just having them is momentous. We've talked of mundane things — books, mostly, our jobs, the people we work with; nothing personal, deep or meaningful. But it's not been meaningless either. There's been more to it than casual banter in the lift or the words you exchange when passing someone on the stairs. Or maybe not. Maybe I'm doing what my colleagues are doing, reading more into the situation than there really is. It's so hard to know.

  She disquiets me. I look at her and see all the things that I am not and never will be, and yet there's something else too, something unfathomable. She's a puzzle. Some days she can look dish-rag plain and some days she can look quite beautiful. I can't make up my mind about her. Or maybe I already have.

  Ignore these jottings. Tonight my sleep's been stirred up by the wind. Is it the storm that's kept me awake or the reviewing of my life? Where have I got to? What have I achieved? Is this it? A bachelor flat and a third-rate lob? What about my dreams and aspirations? Is this the rosy future I dreamed of as a child?

  Perhaps my emotional life is the subject of unthinking habit too. I wonder what greater patterns swirl and form beneath this murky surface. I'm as careful with my feelings as I am with my writing since anything you say may be used as evidence against you. So is it the rumbling and thunder outside that's made me restless or a rising storm within?

  Doldrums

  I was in the office the other day. I call in every now and then to catch up on things and let the staff know I'm still around and looking for work. Some of my fellow unemployees moan about it being a statutory requirement, but I look upon it as the way I earn my living and, in a perverse manner, help those behind the counter to earn theirs. Without the likes of me they'd be where I am, necessitating, in some strange, science-fictiony way, the need for their own existence.

  Of course, it's not called Social Welfare or the dole office any more since we're in the age of calling a spade an earth movement device. This is the office of the Work and Income — the implication being that you already have both. Clearly some of the incomes being supported are those of office outfitters. Every time I visit there seem to be new counters, new carpets, a different décor or updated office equipment.

  I made my visit, queued quietly, filled in the form, signed my name and scurried away. Places like that make me shudder. A wall of bureaucracy surrounds each human transaction. Every form of misery is catalogued and proceduralised with no possible allowance for compassion or charity. There's a form for every situation, a check-list for every application, a set of rules to determine qualification and a security guard on the door. Perhaps it
is just well-oiled machinery, but I can't quite forget that it is from quiet, orderly places like this that the real horrors of the last century emerged.

  To me, Belsen, Dachau, Auschwitz and the rest conjure up images not of the psychotic and murderous few but of the silent, compliant masses behind them. How can you exterminate six million people without quiet armies of clerks processing their papers, battalions of planners co-ordinating railway timetables and wagon movements, platoons of civil servants cataloguing and redistributing the property of the dispossessed, and arrays of architects designing a better death camp? Six million people; think of the paperwork!

  Of course it wasn't called extermination, it was 'internment' or 'resettlement'. Property wasn't stolen it was 'reclaimed' and wagon loads of people were shunted to and fro for 'processing'.

  In quiet, orderly offices like these wars are planned too. Weapons of mass destruction are designed and deployed. Casualties are estimated and missiles targeted. And from offices like these, even yet, the decision may come for the final countdown to the destruction of the planet in another sort of holocaust. You can bet it won't be a decision based on anything human, civilised, rational or decent but simply a matter of policy and procedure.

  Saturday, April 25

  I phoned her up yesterday from my desk. I pretended to dial an outside number but called her extension instead. I was going to invite her out to afternoon tea since she's had so much work on lately that she's been having it at her desk. I had planned it all out in my head, the whole conversation; I was going to do it kind of casual and funny. Then I heard her voice on the other end and lost my nerve. I put the phone down. I couldn't do it. I felt self-conscious and knew it would all just sound false and silly. Besides, she'd probably say no.

  Anyway, why should she even look at me, a pretty girl like that? She probably doesn't even know I exist outside the office. She'll have boyfriends galore and they're bound to be interesting and exciting types with sports cars and boats and such, so what's the point? What chance would I have?