Another customer came into the library and caught the librarian’s eye. I was finished with the library anyway, seeing as there was not a local history section. There were many books about the big city on the coast, full of black-and-white images of men and women laying on the sand, lifesavers lined up in front of their surf clubs, and stern women serving fish and chips across beachfront counters.
*
In the early afternoons I would sit in the pub at the end of my street and drink a beer. It was typical of all the pubs in the town, with sticky floral carpet, a TAB corner, and plastic bistro décor. The bistro in this pub, however, did not operate. The bar was run by a woman named Jenny, and it was through Jenny that I learned much of what there was to know about the town.
I would sit at the bar within earshot of where Jenny typically stood. On my first visit she asked where I was from and I lied that I was from another state. She asked what I was doing in the town and I told her I was working on a book about the disappearing towns of the Central West of New South Wales.
Jenny did not care about my book, and she did not pretend to be interested in the town Meranburn when I talked about it. I listed the few things that I had learned about her town since arriving – chiefly, that there was nothing to learn. She agreed that this was true.
Jenny busied herself for extended periods in the basement, tending to the underbelly of beer taps. Other times she would remove dust from linen in the rooms for rent upstairs. Jenny’s pub did not attract customers. There was no one ever there to enjoy the local radio aired softly through lost speakers, or the poker machines’ ditties, or the races on the televisions. A Keno screen flashed cryptic numbers in one high corner, permitting the illusion that the stakes were high for punters no longer there.
Conversations I had with Jenny were tinged with her hostility. I asked questions about the town, and gleaned answers based on what she said she didn’t know. Everything I said to Jenny seemed to demonstrate whatever point she was trying to get at, even if I suggested the contrary, and even if I thought she wasn’t trying to make a point at all. She was not interested in why I was interested in the town.
I asked Jenny how the town was founded, but she said it hadn’t been. Thinking of being founded was the height of arrogance. People just ended up living there.
I suggested there might have once been some geographical benefit for settling there — for instance the creek, which ran shallow behind the KFC and several petrol stations. She conceded that I might be correct, that back in the olden days people may have wanted to be close to it. Perhaps they drank straight out of it.
For long periods there would be silence. Jenny would polish the bar and glasses, or else check the poker machine cash trays, while I drank from a schooner glass of beer. Then I would ask a question and it would be like a fight.
She didn’t know how old the pub was. She supposed her dad had bought it from someone, and that was it, and there she was. Anyway, why would I want to know something like that?
I said it was because I wanted to know how old the town was.
She made a gesture that suggested I had just made her point. You ask one question, she railed, expecting the answer for a whole other question. And you say you’re writing a non-fiction book!
Some days we would not speak at all, except to transact the beer. Though her pub was empty, Jenny did not appear worried about her livelihood, nor did she treat me with any gratitude. She went about her duties as if quiet were the natural condition for the pub, and when she poured my beer, she did so as if there were other customers waiting. At some point in the past, Jenny must have practised her publican’s demeanour on many drinkers at once, and would have been exposed to the type of gossip and hearsay that came with her profession. No conversational stupidity was a surprise to her – she had heard it all, and she seemed to have cultivated an understanding of the various leniencies beer could afford. But rarely did my conversation qualify among these.
One day, in a rare fit of expansiveness, Jenny said that the town was shrinking and yet expanding at the same time. She clarified: the town was expanding outwards while the number of people living in it was dropping. I was curious about this statement, but she didn’t have any statistics, and she slammed the till shut.
A few days later Jenny felt compelled to elaborate. She observed that as time went by, the town felt emptier. She didn’t know where people were going. They might have been staying at home more. They might have moved away. And then she lit a cigarette, which meant she wanted to say something.
There was a time, she told me, when elderly men and women would sit at the bar and talk her ear off for hours at a time, about the football, about local controversies, and sometimes even about the state of the world. Such talk made the days and evenings go quicker, and while she couldn’t get a word in edgewise — even if she had wanted to — she thought it mildly interesting to hear what elderly people had to say about the big issues of the day.
But then, seemingly within the space of a week, these people started to die. First Ron Fenton died of a stroke. Then Rhonda Gardner tripped, fell, and died. Then various cancers were diagnosed, and heart conditions needed around-the-clock supervision at home, and nursing homes were booked, and the only men and women left at the pub were too scared to speak as freely and aloofly about the troubles of the day. They shuttered themselves, fell into brooding silences, their faces grew sour and frightened, and then finally they would just stay home. Life became too ugly for them. It had proven itself ambivalent to their well-being.
Jenny speculated that people in the town had tended to believe that the natural order worked in their favour, and that nothing bad was ever likely to happen to them specifically. But the old generation was dying, often without dignity, in either solitude or following protracted intolerable illness, and none of them had ever expected this to happen. Yet it did, and so the terrible things they saw on the television and read about in the newspapers seemed suddenly in closer proximity. These people primarily lived during a time when nothing bad ever happened, not in the town, not in the country. Bad things only happened to other people far away. Old age and looming death had changed that, as she supposed it did for all old people, with the added bonus that indeed, the world was becoming more hostile. But not here. She waved towards the races. Not just yet.
I did not drink many beers during any session at Jenny’s pub. I did not know how to get drunk. Always after three beers the alcohol would go to my head and then I’d walk home and have a rest, or else transcribe from memory my conversations with Jenny at the pub, before going to the Woolworths to work. Everything Jenny said seemed untrue once I’d written it on paper.
I told Jenny one day that I never had more than three beers because I did not know how to get drunk.
You’re obviously from another state, she said.
*
The town was quiet and lonely on a Sunday morning. Few shops opened, and those that did attracted no customers. Only the petrol stations and fast-food chains lining the highway West to East had any people in them.
The highway was the real main street of the town. Cars crowded the drive-through lanes and parking lots of the KFC and McDonald’s, while the petrol stations were alive with bowser boys pumping petrol and scrubbing windscreens caked with the entrails of locusts. Visitors passed through the town ambivalently. Few turned left or right into the town centre proper, but a barely perceptible sadness awaited those who did. On a Sunday morning the town seemed lost to the countryside and highways surrounding, and the people there pitiable in their inconsequence. During a lengthy drive from the country to the city, passing through the town could make the world seem larger and more unfathomable, because how did these people get here, and why did they stay?
The four-lane highway led all the way to the city, and in the opposite direction, all the way to the centre of the continent. The town was lucky to be situated here, lucky to be connected to somewhere else. Yet few people in the town believed the busy
highway represented a proper route out of, and away from, the town. Instead, it was the direction from which others arrived.
Rob worked as a car washer at one of the half-dozen petrol stations lining the highway. He could tell if people were from the city or the country just by the look of them. If they came from the country their headlights and windscreen were caked with locusts. If they came from the city it was city grime. You could run your fingers deep through that grime, he said. Fumes and pollution.
All visitors were vague threats, distant and unchallenged. Those who arrived from the city were not to be trusted, while those who arrived from further inland were suspected of possessing a more authentic claim to country life than anyone in the town. The city was always the city, while the country — the far western country — was hopeless and remote. The city was built-up suburbs and then even bigger buildings, while the west was just a vision of flat brown paddocks and dirt roads. The town was somewhere in between. There was nothing wrong with it.
Arabs, Asians and wogs all come from the city, Rob advised. Normal white people, farmers, business-owners, and dolebludgers all come from the country, and he pointed west. Especially dole-bludgers.
On two consecutive Sundays I decided to follow the highway on foot in both its westerly and easterly directions. Travelling west, the town petered out with a final destitute car yard, its faded coloured flaps wilting in the heat. Facing out in this direction the shimmer appeared, a foreboding haziness on the horizon, shrouding some impenetrable frontier. Travelling east, road signs enticed with three digit numbers indicating the distance in kilometres to the coastal city, but the signs also featured other place names, all unrecognisable. Had anyone verified they were there?
They’re towns, Jenny told me. Of course they’re there.
On a Sunday morning in the town it was impossible to know what to do with yourself. It was possible to lose hours of the day staring out of windows. Maybe some people had barbeque lunches in their backyards, while others watched the football. I could do nothing but drink beer and browse the town’s local newspaper, searching for evidence of its origins but also, hopefully, of its future.
Jenny said she didn’t know the town’s population, nor how old it was, nor what its name meant, nor how many houses it had, nor what its people thought, nor what its favourite colour was. It’s just a bloody town, she yelled at me, and then turned the races up before leaving the room.
During the evening hours when I felt most free to wander, I monitored the streets of the town for evidence that I could belong. At times, certain angles on settings seemed to suggest that it might be a place I could in some fashion adapt to. The greening wall of a two-storey townhouse, exposed to the footpath, where the traces of a certain determined moisture lingered, especially at night, seemed to belong to a place where I might find my roots. It required a great amount of concentration to detect the threads, apparitional as they were. The appearances of such threads occurred most frequently when gazing at the tiled roofs of the oldest buildings, set against the starry rural nights. At all times, these appearances occurred at the very edge of some form of structure, and taking in the whole of a setting would usually undermine the strange, alluring sensation of having been there before. I had long suspected that willpower was not enough to transform a setting full of apprehension into a welcoming one, but the occasional small breakthrough, fleeting and unsatisfying, compelled me to keep trying.
My efforts to trap these sensations, to apply them thinly across the town’s expanse, always failed. I held some small hope that if these small glimpses existed, these illuminating angles, then maybe they were pitching their own quiet battle against the cold, ambivalent spread. Maybe inside the town there was another, parallel town, itself scarcely populated with the wandering lost, occupied by their own search for a hidden angle which could permit their access home.
*
Ciara was Rob’s girlfriend and she was a local of the town. Rob made a point of mentioning that she was a local. He lived in the townhouse because his parents happened to own it, and aside from working at one of the highway petrol stations he also went to TAFE.
Rob told me that he and Ciara were an unusual coupling. This was because, according to Rob, it was undesirable for TAFE students to have close relationships with the local townspeople. It was fine to be in relationships with women from other towns and vice versa, but it was most prestigious to be in relationships with women from the city, though Rob admitted he had never met anyone from the city.
She’s a bit of a local but I don’t care, Rob would sometimes say.
Ciara spent a lot of time at our house and we got along well. She always seemed interested in whatever I was doing at any particular time. If I was cooking my dinner in the kitchen she would say something like, cooking your dinner there are you, before launching into a discussion about the best things to have for dinner. Light conversations like this would inevitably branch off into more interesting discussions. Ciara asked so many questions that I began to suspect she was trying to understand me.
One day she arrived at the house as I was walking from my bedroom into the living room. She asked what I had been up to that day, to which I replied that I had been writing my book about the disappearing towns of the Central West of New South Wales. This elicited a response I will never forget: she was more impressed about my writing a book than anyone else I had ever encountered. She asked when she would be able to read my book, and I told her that she was welcome to read it whenever she wanted, even now, should she wish. She said that if I made her a copy she would read it later.
Rob sometimes asked whether I was annoyed that Ciara was always over. It’s true that she spent most days at the townhouse, but that did not bother me. As long as she didn’t interrupt work on my book, I told him, she could do as she wished. Rob would watch less television when she was around, and he even shaved on days she was to arrive. Based on these habits, I gathered that he was in love with her.
In Rob’s townhouse the smell of vinegar was rivalled only by the smell of mould. Fly corpses littered the windowsills behind greasy venetians, and dusty cobwebs hung from the ceiling, left swinging further and further towards the carpet for days at a time. Neither of them seemed to care. This filth was transitional, almost an obligation. Rob, and presumably Ciara, did not want to clean up after anyone, least of all themselves. There wasn’t the time right now, and as the days and weeks wore on, the right time seemed more remote and less inevitable. The shape into which one is expected to grow had long lost its form. In someone older it would be a depression, but in Rob and Ciara it seemed an act of defiance. Ciara would even sometimes laugh at the filth. One evening, as I carried my bowl to the kitchen in order to fill it with bread, I caught her smiling at the mushed penne latched to the edges of the drain.
This is chaos, she said. You can have everything in order, a roof and several walls, functioning electricity, endless gas, running water, a cupboard full of quick meals, a fridge full of luxurious sparkling soft drinks, a telephone for emergencies, but the gunk in your sink will undermine it all. She turned the tap on high, and pushed the pasta down the drain with her index finger.
She found filth funny because it undermined everything. She appreciated its villainy. She explained that in the city they have cockroaches so numerous that whole rooms can appear to be breathing, like a blackened lung, as the pests scatter with the flick of a light switch. In cities it’s important to have filth, she told me. It’s what makes a city a city. And yet, cities are meant to be civilised, they’re meant to boast the type of facilities people such as us could only admire from afar. This sink — she turned the tap off and wiped her hands on her jeans — wishes badly that it was a city sink. If only the window — and she waved at the window above — looked out on buildings much higher than the ones around here, where the density of homes is so great that statistically, chaos is within a stone’s throw. The town’s chaos, where it exists at all, is in sinks, in the corners of ceilings, in
the muck beneath refrigerators, among the lost socks beneath lounge suites, in old sheds barricaded by useless old appliances and furniture. The chaos is pathetic, but you can’t feel sorry for it, so you can only laugh at it.
After a couple of weeks I could no longer just respond to Ciara’s questions, could no longer simply listen to her expound upon vague worldly topics as a means to bridge a gap. In order to not appear cold, I would need to ask her some questions too.
I asked whether she thought her town was mysterious. She did not. I asked whether she had ever read any books about her town. She had never read a non-fiction book. She only read the newspaper, because she believed it was the objective of the newspaper to find the strangest and most violent happenings in the town. And yet, apart from the odd act of violence or robbery, always fuelled by alcohol, there were never any secrets in the town the likes of which you can read about in bigger newspapers. She brandished a week-old edition of the Sydney Morning Herald.
One day Ciara arrived at the house and knocked on my bedroom door. She told me she had read the printed extracts from my book about the disappearing towns. She needed to sit down in order to offer all her thoughts about the extracts, so I invited her to sit in my desk chair. I was not nervous about her feedback because she was not a writer of books.
The Town Page 2
