by Geoff Palmer
• • •
Don't believe everything you see and hear, and that includes this statement.
• • •
What it comes down to at the end of the day is that belief is just a matter of choice, and that choice is often the result of laziness. Betti votes the way her father always voted and Fletcher's a Catholic because that's how he was brought up. God knows what ridiculous commitments to bits of trash I've picked up over the years.
The trouble is that those closest to knowing what makes us choose from the endless flux presented by our daily lives — from toothpaste to political systems — are the ones we should trust least because they'll use it to further their own ends. Who determines the common good from the common bad?
• • •
Information is power. Whoever controls it controls the world.
• • •
I'm not criticising. I'm not hankering for a bygone age and saying that we're doomed. Oh no, quite the reverse. I'm a New Age man, the man of many shells, the chameleon. I can be whatever you choose, whatever you want me to be. I'll tell you what you really want to hear. I can re-script my life and be someone else tomorrow.
• • •
You know what I've learned? You know what Stuart and Marie and Barry bloody Kennedy have taught me? That everything can be slotted in. Everything can be twisted to fit. Just a little tweak here and there, a little filler to cover the cracks. As long as you don't bend things too far no one will notice. Don't tamper with the facts, just fit your interpretation to them or ignore them completely. Truth is relative. Relative to who you are and what you're after.
• • •
When I was a child, before we lost the shop, we had a cat. A sleek, affectionate, fine-boned animal and a 'champion mouser', as my father used to call him. His job was to keep vermin from the storeroom, a job he handled too well because their total absence left him with the instinct and the time to massacre anything else that moved in the neighbourhood. Field mice, wetas, baby rabbits from the paddocks up the road, sparrows, fantails, lizards ... all deposited and neatly eviscerated on the back porch. He didn't do it for food. It was for sport or perhaps his way of repaying our care and affection.
One day he took the neighbour's canary. How he did so we'll never know. Whether he opened the bird's cage himself or simply took advantage of an oversight is immaterial; there was no mistaking the broken yellow body on the steps. But we kept it quiet. We even joined the fruitless search for Joey, knowing all the while that he lay buried down the back. It was a harmless lie, wasn't it? It allowed our neighbours the myth that maybe someone else was looking after Joey now, that maybe he'd escaped and found a better place. It kept us neighbourly and allowed them still to stroke the cat as he lay sunning himself on the fence, allowed their children to rub their faces against his silky fur and admire his teeth and claws without knowing their complicity in the disappearance of their pet.
A harmless lie? Harmless to whom? Who decides these things?
• • •
It is in the nature of a cat to kill. The lion within is something we accept as it stretches by the fire or snoozes lovingly in our lap. It might be regrettable, but it is irretrievably part and parcel of the animal's essence. To deny it is to see only half the picture, the half we wish were whole. Yet we accept the cat's dichotomy but excuse our own. The lion within is not really us, it is demons or devil or original sin. We're not really like that, we say, we don't know what got into us. We're really kind and loving and compassionate, honest ... As if two million years of bloody evolution can be reasoned away.
• • •
We all know what murderers are like. Hollywood's shown us, so it must be true. You can spot them a mile off for their lack of good looks and propensity for poor lighting. They often have scars or bad skin and a six o'clock shadow is a definite giveaway. They're warped, vindictive, perverted and rather stupid psychotics with rasping voices who've dabbled once too often in the black arts. Aren't they? Of course they are. Surely they couldn't be people like us?
Do you think Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and all the rest never had a childhood? Never suckled at a mother's breast or laughed and cried or loved and lost or wept in despair at lonely hours in the darkness? Look in a mirror, you'll see what they were like. You've only to scratch the learning to find the brute.
• • •
So half the world starves or bleeds in our living rooms every night and still we cannot see. In sight, yet firmly out of mind. More fiction please, I can't watch this. What's on the other side?
• • •
You want an ending, not a lecture. What would you like? Upbeat, downbeat, morbid, glum or sinister? A bit of philosophy? The triumph of the righteousness over evil? A warm, fuzzy feeling to lull you to sleep? You choose. After all, you always do.
Thursday, 28 May
Betti had arranged for Pid to collect me from work this evening and I expected another two-hour wait in the draughty car park but, to my amazement, he was already there when I got out. I tried quizzing him about the 'special family celebration' Betti had talked of, but all he'd say was that he was sworn to secrecy and that I'd find out shortly.
When we got to Valhalla it did indeed look like a family gathering because the only other people there were Betti's sister and brother-in-law parked in the living room in front of the TV. Their noxious twins, Lucretia and Bernardo (I kid you not!), were busy in the back yard tormenting the wildlife and flattening flower beds.
Betti greeted me with her customary huggies and even had some left over for Stu.
'Ginny's already guessed, eh,' she said motioning towards her sister, 'so I might as well tell you right away.'
'Oh, I've got some other good news for you two as well,' put in Stu, 'but you first dear.'
'Dear'? I thought, and huggies? Then I guessed too.
'You're going to be an uncle!'
There were more hugs, kisses and congratulations. Stu stood there beaming broadly and Betti's sister passed round drinks and proposed a toast. Even the brother-in-law managed to put down the remote control long enough to take up a glass and wave his support.
l was really pleased for them. I know it means a lot to Betti, and Stuart seems, well, different somehow. More relaxed, more human.
'The real party's Saturday night,' Betti explained, 'but we wanted the family to know first, eh.'
Suddenly Pid shushed us silent and called out, 'Turn it up. Bob.'
Bob obliged and all eyes swivelled to the television.
'In the news tonight,' came the voice-over. 'A high-speed police chase ends in the death of a murder suspect ... a long-awaited leadership bid is finally made public ... and Bubbles the giraffe gets a cure for her sore throat.'
Stuart leaned over and gave me a friendly punch.
'That was all your doing.'
'Mine?' I said, unable to take my eyes off the screen for a second.
'Yes, that's all down to you bro.'
I shook my head
'Oh absolutely.'
I finally tore myself away from images of mangled motorbikes, talking heads and lolloping animals and, seeing all their eyes on me, shrugged, 'Well, I must admit, for a while there I thought Bubbles would never get better.'
You know what? Pid actually laughed.
Ends
All's well that ends. Or in my case, all's well that's abandoned. I can't possibly live here any more, this is no place for an artist. Barchester Towers is being invaded; brats are replacing the rats. The latter were far more preferable since they kept their own hours and themselves to themselves, unlike the former, who take delight in pushing every single button in the lift in order to turn a short unpleasant journey into a long unpleasant one, or race shrieking hither and yon around, about and all over the building, or find endless pleasure in knocking on my front door and running away before I can answer. I've even come to miss that slurring malaprop Harry Purvis. At least he was a stationary danger, not one that comes hurtling round c
orners at crotch height with the velocity and control of an unguided missile.
The Hamidullahs, their quiet, meticulous offspring and their mouth-watering culinary aromas have departed, replaced by a perennially unemployable family of six and the smell of boiled cabbage. Purvis's flat has been redecorated and turned over to a solo mum with three screamers, and the hood who inhabited 'd' has been replaced with a pair of spaced-out seventies rejects and their ghastly teenage sons named Loot and Burn. It's all too much. I'm getting out before the violence starts. It's only a matter of time before I throttle one of the bastards.
Abandoned, too, is my novel. Ah, who wants to read a picaresque in the age of virtual reality and information super highways? No, I have in mind something much more suitable, more low-brow, less weighty, ideally adaptable to television and film, in short — in the parlance of my brother the PR prostitute — a more commercial product. The humorous story of two block-headed policeman solving a murder while wandering through a mélange of literary styles and genres. Provisional title: A Tale of Two Thickies.
This damp and gloomy spot with its constant squall of infants is no place to write comedy. I need a change, a breath of fresh air, a room or two in one of those boxes down there clustered in the light of a fading sun. I need compatriots for dark cafés, people to linger with over espressos while scratchy Billie Holiday tracks set the mood. I need encouragement and solace, intelligence and wit and, above all, a haven from these damned kids.
I visited just such a place last night. My pick of two small flats with the only downside being the horrors of early morning sun. The landlord was keen I should take the large two-bedroom place downstairs with its kitchen sink view of my former abode and its two-bedroom rental price, but I shall stick with morning sun and heavy curtains. I grilled him about my fellow tenants — current as well as prospective since he still has two flats to go — but he assured me no riff-raff need apply.
'They give me trouble in the past,' he said in his discordant European accent. 'No more.' The current sole incumbent is a clerk in the single flat downstairs at the back — 'very quiet chap, not a peep'.
It bodes well, it feels right. Disguising my beneficiary status in my customary manner, I informed my new feoffer that I was a salesman of zumbooruks.
'Getaway!' he said. 'Still they make 'em, eh?'
Sunday, 31 May
Everyone's moving out. The tall girl left this weekend and Mr Hamidullah said that they'll be going too, as soon as they can find somewhere else. It's a funny sort of reaction, that moving away response. I can understand the need to make a break and a fresh start, but a different location and different environment are just temporary distractions. You can't get away from yourself.
Speaking of moving, I think Torn Coutts may be on his way. There were all sorts of ructions at work on Friday after a couple of journalists started enquiring about a rumour that a senior manager had to pay off a former lover to get her out of the department. No one got much work done with all the excited gossip and people to-ing and fro-ing to the tenth floor all morning. I was one of the last ones to be summoned.
One of the tenth floor executives was my manager when I first started in the department, so I was a bit reticent about I saying what had been going on. She's very sharp and spotted it right away. 'This isn't like you, Steven,' she said. 'He's not threatened you, has he?'
'Um ... well ... er... not exactly,' I said.
'What do you mean?'
So I told her what he said a couple of weeks ago, about how if I didn't toe the line I'd better start looking for another job because things here would get tougher and tougher.
She didn't say anything after that. She just sat back and looked at the others.
No, I've thought about moving too, but I like my little hideaway and my patch of garden and, besides, there's nothing I can do to change the past. Poor Julie. It was awful what happened, but it did have a certain inevitability to it. I've seen it coming for ages. She shouldn't have got involved with that thug.
I've still not told anyone about finding her body on the afternoon I had that row with Stuart. How I needed someone to talk to and wanted to see if she was okay after the ruckus I'd heard the night before. It'd only cause complications and they'd just ask awkward questions like why, if I'd had no reply to my knocking, did I try the door? (I still don't know. I just had a feeling.) Why did I go inside? What did I do when I found her? Why didn't I call the police? Then there'd be all the other stuff. How long had I known her? What was my relationship with her? Was I the reason she was throwing her boyfriend out?
No, I'm glad I stayed out of that stuff. It's all over now. They got the guilty party, the really guilty one.
Anyway, it's the first thing that's ever drawn this neighbourhood together. Suddenly it's started to feel like a community, with people acknowledging each other in the street and passing the time of day. I've no intention of moving now that I'm just getting to know my neighbours.
For example, there's a rather shy redhead who flats on her own over the back, diagonally behind the carport. She's one of those nervy types with half a dozen locks on her front and back doors. She was quite disturbed by what happened over here, but it had a macabre fascination for her, in spite of herself. It turns out she's something of a Barry Kennedy fan too and was most impressed that I write speeches for him.
At first sight she looks rather plain — no make-up, hair tied straight back and a propensity for baggy jumpers — but I saw the potential right away. She has a lovely figure. I caught her silhouetted against a standard lamp in her nightdress the other evening and I've seen glimpses of her through the bathroom window. She locks her doors but she's not too rigorous with her curtains.
In fact, I might pop over now and tell her about seeing Barry at Pid and Betti's party last night. Maybe I'll even give her a sneak preview of his next speech. It'll be a good excuse for a visit.
I
From time to time I've glimpsed the void, often, strangely enough, in the company of others — acquaintances, relations, friends. Like a rustling behind the curtain of fellowship and laughter; a desert beyond the crush and bustle of the city; the vast hollow emptiness of space beyond the blueness of the planet. It brushes past my shoulder or juggles lightly in the pit of my stomach. A feeling, a sense, a hint of darkness beyond the lights, of the value and the loss of every moment and, over all, a taste of our own mortality in the endlessness of time itself.
Perhaps that's why we cling to stories. They help us to forget. They distract, amuse and draw us away from that inevitable conclusion. In fiction we're every one of us gods.
And I must ask myself what I am doing here, hammering in my own small pointless way against the void, hunched over a desk, committing these words to paper while sunlight and life streams through and past my closed window?
Perhaps, in the end, acceptance is all we can ever truly attain. This is me; I am the way I am and the chances, changes and hazards of life might shape and modify the form, but still within is that essential, solitary I.
I am a room-sitter, an observer, a commentator on the vicissitudes of and the players in the game of life. I shall never walk upon the moon or the Antarctic, plumb deep-sea depths or travel to the stars, cross scorching deserts and trackless jungles, or reach that fairy tale state of happiness the books of my childhood lied to me about.
So why carry on? It's a reasonable question. With our knowledge now of the finitude of everything — our lives, our paltry written history, our evolution, even our lonely planet — none of it forming so much as a grain of sand on the beach of time. In the end, I suppose, we cling to life because it's all we've got. That and stories.
Flaubert said that language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the while we long to move the stars to pity. So here I sit, tapping away on my own cracked kettle, now and then catching some rhythm beyond the ken of the muzzled beast at my side, surprising myself with the lilt and cadence of the word
s, transporting briefly to another place before slipping back again and catching step with my lumbering friend.
THE END
For my mother and father ...
... with love
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About the Author
Geoff Palmer is an award-winning novelist and technical writer
based in Wellington, New Zealand.
You’ll find him online at:
www.geoffpalmer.co.nz
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Praise for Telling Stories
