Her feedback was not favourable. She couldn’t tell whether the book was fiction or fact. She thought it was written well, but also felt as if I were trying hard to draw a singular message from the disappearing towns, and ultimately side-skirting the message because I did not know what it was. So really I would be inviting other people to find something important about the disappearing towns for themselves, and she suspected I might just waste their time.
Ciara asked what was so important about the disappearing towns. I told her that there was nothing important about the disappearing towns. That the disappearing towns were the opposite of important, since nobody knew they existed, and, even when they did exist, no one cared to write about them. There were no facts about the disappearing towns except for minor references in books written about larger towns that hadn’t disappeared, and the existence of train stations that had fallen into disrepair along the routes leading to the centre of the country. Occasionally there was an old water tank, or a lone colonial building absorbed by Paterson’s Curse, or a well shaft boarded up, or a clearing with foundations showing evidence of a narrow main road. There were no memories, but there were town names that had lingered on maps.
Imagine if this town disappeared in one hundred years, I said. Everything it stood for, or represented, would turn to dust. Everything noble about it would be forgotten. You cannot imagine it, I told Ciara. You might also hope it couldn’t be true.
This did not adequately explain all my feelings about the disappearing towns, but Ciara nodded, albeit dubiously. I hoped she would feel unqualified to fathom my book, but she insisted.
She suggested that it couldn’t be a non-fiction book, since everything in it was made up.
It was true that I had speculated on a large variety of issues, but this did not make the book strictly fictional. What cannot be verified is not necessarily fiction, I said.
I waited for her to ask more questions about my book, but she appeared to believe that she already understood. She pretended to be chastened, and then asked me what else I had done that day.
*
At first I rarely strayed from the central district of the town. Arranged in long symmetrical grids, it was where the elderly and wealthy people lived, on roads wide and empty save for the parked sedans. Townhouses, petrol stations and open-air asphalt car parks lined the blocks at the fringes, as did more modern single-storey homes.
Outside of the central district the town was disorganised. Roads wound through estates of modern brick mansions and undeveloped land, trailing off into dirt fields littered with discarded whitegoods and felled gums. There was no way out of these winding streets except back the way you came. The sun found no resistance, just scorched everything grey and brown and every other dull colour in between.
I asked Rob whether he had ever explored the tentacle roads, but he didn’t even know they existed. His family owned a stately colonial home in the imported leafy outskirts of the central district, and had done so since he was born.
I asked Jenny why the tentacle roads were laid out so strangely, but she said it was only natural.
What’s so interesting about roads, she said.
Only one bus operated for those in the town who did not drive. It left the central district at 8:30am and spent an hour stopping at key landmarks on the southern side of town. Then it travelled each of the tentacle roads, lumbered through the north, and then returned to the terminal in time for a late afternoon tea. From there it would start again along the same route.
The bus driver was a man named Tom. He drove, opened the doors at stops, waited ten seconds, and then commenced driving again.
One day I waited at one of these stops. Tom asked where I was going, and I said I wasn’t going anywhere. I only wanted to see the town from the vantage point of a bus.
Well, this is the best way to see the whole town, he said. The bus goes everywhere. It’s an exhaustive bus route, but unfortunately an impractical one. From the end of any of the roads it takes two hours to walk to the centre of town, whereas from any given point in the route it takes two and a half hours to travel a similar distance by bus. It would be practical to have another bus and two routes, Tom said. It would be more practical to have two more buses and a total of three routes. But since no one ever rides even this route, the council won’t buy more buses or employ extra drivers.
The tentacle roads did not appear to belong to the town proper. Many homes on these roads were for display purposes only, and unlike in the central district trees were rare, save the occasional preened shrub or stunted trunk.
Tom performed a U-turn at the end of a tentacle road. No one in the town ever rode his bus. They all had cars: usually two, sometimes three. It was impossible to walk to the shops in any timely fashion, so people would drive to one of the shopping plazas for everything. The only time the bus might have been useful was of an evening on the weekend, when everyone was too drunk to legally drive home, but the bus didn’t operate during that time. The bus terminated at the centre of town at seven in the evening, and that was when, according to Tom, most people started drinking.
He had mentioned this to his bosses at the council but they weren’t interested in adapting the timetable to suit the town’s needs. All they’d told him was that the town must have a bus, so it had a bus, and that was all he needed to worry about. So Tom drove in circles every day for the benefit of no one.
The bus turned out of one tentacle road and into another. Immaculate cars baked in white cement driveways, and sprinkler systems doused the brown lawns with bore water. Curtains were drawn, and no one wandered the pathless nature strips. It was possible to see where one lawn ended and another began by the different shades of brown and dull green, or by the bumpiness of the turf, or by the dirt strips left between houses, marking contractual borders respected to the nearest centimetre.
Tom lived on the bus; he never left it, save to eat at the McDonald’s and shower at the football oval. I was the first passenger he’d had for several years.
Tom told me a story about one of his most recent passengers. This man had boarded at the central terminal some years ago and hadn’t wanted to go anywhere in particular — he’d boarded to speak to Tom. He did so because, for many years, Tom had sang in a local rock group. This local rock group were the most popular local rock group in the town, and they went by the name The Stern Gentlemen.
Tom told me he was proud that a young man, though odd, would board a bus just to speak to him. Being the most popular local rock group for a period of time did not attract the level of ongoing respect I might imagine, he said. If it did, he supposed the bus would have attracted more passengers.
After a few formalities and polite exchanges, the young man, Raymond, said he fronted his own local rock band in the town. According to Raymond, the music in the town was not what it used to be. Tom had agreed for the sake of politeness, but in truth he couldn’t have cared less about the music in the town at that current point in time, because he attended a concert many years before that had ended his music career. It was a concert which had revealed all of his efforts to be useless.
Raymond was unhappy because he believed the people in the town no longer cared about rock music, and he wanted Tom’s help to revitalise the town’s interest in it. He made a proposition: if The Stern Gentlemen played a show with Raymond’s band as support group, the former would receive all of the takings. Raymond believed this would be a good opportunity for his own band to gain exposure. After their chat, Raymond alighted at the edge of town, where the highway led to the first of the modern estates.
Tom pondered the opportunity for several days, and brought the topic up with his former bassist. He was excited at the prospect but no one else in the band was, least of all the drummer, who had gone on to manage Clint’s Crazy Bargains.
Tom and the bassist decided they would play a two-piece acoustic set in support of Raymond’s band. The concert would take place in town, Raymond would handle promotion, and The Stern
Gentlemen would receive all earnings at the end of the night. Tom thought about declining the generous offer of full payment, but driving an empty bus did not entitle him to a high salary.
Tom and the bassist practiced in Tom’s living room for many weeks, and it was exhilarating to revisit the songs that he thought he’d never hear again. The sound of their songs, even without the keyboard and percussion elements, served to demonstrate how much the town had changed over the years. The songs were capable of conjuring the way the town had felt back then, even though the band had never designed them that way. It was especially powerful because Tom, and the bass player, and presumably everyone else in the town, had never noticed any drastic change occur in the town at all. When they rehearsed the songs together it was apparent that much had changed, and not necessarily for the better. Tom was excited for the opportunity to illustrate this change, even though he couldn’t articulate exactly what the change was. This sense of dimension had arguably been what his music had always lacked, during the years when he was still naïve enough to write it. He even fooled himself into believing they had been underappreciated. These songs, presented in this new light, might lead to a renaissance for The Stern Gentlemen.
But things were not right as soon as they arrived at the venue to load in. For starters, Raymond’s band had not arrived. Secondly, there was no stage. Thirdly, the barperson did not know of any gig happening that night, and couldn’t even remember the last time the venue had hosted one.
Tom turned onto the highway and towards the terminal. He should have called it a night right then, he told me. He should have taken his gear home and admitted to himself that he had been conned. But he had worked himself up to that night for many weeks, and had established a strong urge to express himself one last time. So with the encouragement of the bassist, who had long wanted the band to reform due to an unrealistic opinion of the band’s significance, Tom suggested to the barperson that they play an impromptu performance in the bistro. It was an acoustic set after all, and since few diners were seated in the bistro it would not inconvenience anyone. “If people in the bar are interested, they will come in and listen,” was how Tom tried to convince the barperson. But this barperson was too young to be swayed by a mention of The Stern Gentlemen, and besides, the barperson said, live rock music was banned from pubs and venues.
Tom was shocked. He discovered that live rock music had been banned in the town for nearly fifteen years – as many years as The Stern Gentlemen had been out of action. It was now illegal to have a guitar in a pub. Illegal to sing in a pub. There were signs throughout the bar warning patrons not to sing along to television commercials or poker machine ditties, as it would put them at risk of being kicked off the premises.
There was no way to play a gig that night, so he went home. He didn’t even say goodbye to his bass player, who was busy trying to pick a fight with the barperson.
At the time Tom was living in a townhouse near the bus terminal, and the next day he cancelled his lease and moved onto the bus. He sold his guitar and all of his furniture. He sent his dog to the pound. He wanted to divorce himself entirely from the town and what it had become, but it was necessary to work — and he tapped on the bus’s steering wheel — in order to survive.
Tom had quietly believed that he would play music again one day. And yet, after the events of that night he could no longer bear to live in the town, much less perform in it. But there was no possible way out, so he had to make do with living around the town instead – more preferable to living in a static location within it.
At this point he didn’t speak to anyone for months, not even his superiors at the council. He stopped contacting them about anything, and he soon realised that they’d never been the ones to contact him – it had always been he who had initiated any communication. He suspected they’d quickly forgotten about the bus route. He also stopped reading the newspaper and he barely even looked at the town as he passed by it all throughout the day. He fixed his attention on the roads and the bus stops, and became lost in his own thoughts. Who was this Raymond fellow, and why had he played such a cruel trick on him? Did Raymond hate The Stern Gentlemen? Did all young people ridicule the memory of his band? Or was Raymond an out-of-towner?
Tom directed my attention to the bus stop shelter opposite the Woolworths parking lot. A year or so after the night of the thwarted gig, on a miserable Monday afternoon with torrential rain and no one in the streets, Tom had driven past this same location. During rainy weather he sometimes felt like he should never have had his tantrum, should never have moved onto the bus and removed himself entirely from the town. Rain made him feel like it was all a mistake, that he’d be better off sitting in a warm house watching the television.
That day there had been someone waiting in the shelter. She’d waved him down as though she wanted to catch the bus, and Tom had braked towards her. He’d been frightened. Nothing good had ever come of someone boarding his bus, but if word got out that he’d left a young teenage girl alone at the bus stop, he might lose his home. So he stopped.
Tom pointed to exactly where the girl had been standing. She must have been fourteen, maybe a bit younger. He’d asked her where she wanted to go. She didn’t want to go anywhere – no one ever wanted to go anywhere on his bus.
Instead, she’d wanted him to advertise a gig in the window of the bus. She’d said: just stick the poster up in one of the passenger windows, or maybe in the rear window, so drivers behind you can see. Tom warned her that no gigs ever happened in the town anymore. They’d been banned.
The girl had said she knew that, but wanted to advertise the gig anyway. The bands don’t actually exist, she’d said, and the venues don’t exist. But the music exists. She set the posters on the dash.
Tom had told her that she couldn’t just go around advertising imaginary concerts for bands that didn’t exist. She’d replied that as a matter of fact she could, and she had, and what harm would it do anyway, since no one in the town was interested in music.
She was only very young. Tom used the opportunity to tell her all about his time playing music in the town, and how the music community was back in the olden days. She wouldn’t have a bar of it. He’d warned her that he was a living example of what could go wrong when people advertised phantom gigs for non-existent bands, but she wasn’t interested. She’d seemed quite hostile, Tom said, as if it were all his fault that concerts could no longer be held in the town, save the special town day at the central park every year.
She’d gotten off the bus at the stop near the central park. Rather than feel angry, Tom had felt sad for her – and Raymond too. It all just reminded him of his predicament: there he was, driving a bus. The bus was there, it operated, it had a driver, it had a timetable, but it was only ninety per cent a bus. The raw components of a bus route were in place, but the town forbade it reaching one hundred per cent. Meanwhile, the life he had lived as a young man was nothing but a memory.
Once Tom had realised this he was less bitter about the Raymond boy. He understood the boy’s plight, because nothing in the town was one hundred per cent. There was always a missing fraction, he said. It functioned, but that’s all it did, and how it continued to do so was a mystery to him.
*
One day as I was cooking my pasta, Rob revealed that a man in the town wanted to bash me.
Steve Sanders has it in for you, he told me. Some men at the pub have warned that you should watch your back.
I was shocked. I had barely been in the town six months and had not wronged anyone as far as I could tell. I had made a conscious effort to avoid men while in the town, and I had made extra efforts to appear meek and harmless around people of the town who might be offended or curious about my presence.
I told Rob that he must be joking. Or else there was a misunderstanding, that Steve Sanders had mistaken me for someone else.
He definitely means you, Rob said. Steve Sanders wants to bash you, probably because you’re writing a book about
the town.
I explained again to Rob that my book was not about this town, but other towns – most of which did not verifiably exist.
He shrugged and took a can of beer from the fridge. You don’t come to a new town expecting not to be bashed, he said.
I barely slept that week. I skipped two shifts at the Woolworths out of fear. I studied the phonebook for address details about this Steve Sanders, but there were at least three dozen S. Sanderses listed as living in the town: a startling statistic under any other circumstance, but one I simply observed with dread at the time. I grew so desperate for information that I considered posting a note on the message board that stood in the central park, imploring Steve Sanders to call me so we could discuss his problem. But if Steve Sanders had decided he wanted to bash me with no wrongdoing on my part, I resolved that he must hold some irrational hatred towards me. Steve Sanders was a monster that could not be reasoned with.
Jenny at the pub was not surprised when I told her Steve Sanders wanted to bash me, because she already knew.
You get that, she said ambivalently. Men want to bash men. Who else are they going to bash?
I told her that there were definitely situations where a man could justifiably want to bash another. But this was not one of them. It wasn’t a situation at all. I had never met or even seen Steve Sanders before.
Just get bashed, Jenny suggested. Get it over with. He’ll bash you then it’ll be done. Have you never been bashed before? I told her I hadn’t. Then it’s about time you did, she said.
As the weeks passed I became less worried about being bashed and more anxious about what could have caused Steve Sanders to hate me. Having recalled and analysed every rare occasion I had mingled in public, and having failed, after exhaustive self-critique, to pinpoint a reason for his disdain, I started to imagine what it would be like to have a conversation with Steve Sanders. I imagined striding up to him at some or other pub, ordering us both a schooner of beer, and me initiating a dignified defence of myself. I would admit to him that yes, I do look like someone deserving of being bashed, and for that I have only myself to blame. I have lived with being a prime candidate for bashings all my life, but in spite of all my efforts to reverse this truth, I am sadly still who I am. I would tell Steve Sanders that the reality is that I am actually a sad and depressed man. That I have little to nothing going for me. I would do my best to paint myself as an already-harried and pathetic individual, in order for Steve Sanders to see that I was not worth bashing. Maybe, after I had poured my heart out to Steve Sanders, he would even have sympathy and become my friend. Or else he would become a man in the town eager to come to my defence in the seemingly inevitable event that someone else would want to bash me. He’s not worth it, Steve Sanders would warn them.
The Town Page 3
