But on closer inspection it was obvious they were all drinking. Many, if not all, of the queuing revellers were sipping from small flasks, and hidden cans and bottles, and probably becoming more drunk than anyone in the official drinking area. I explained the situation to Jenny, who was amused.
Of course they’re getting drunk, she said. No one was going to not drink, even if it was against council regulations to drink outside of the cordoned-off area.
I wondered aloud why the people wanted so badly to enter the area, since they were able to drink outside of it anyway, albeit illegally, and Jenny made a gesture with her head which suggested I had already made her point.
You’re exactly right, she told me. To be in the official drinking area was to be officially drinking. Then she waved vaguely at the queue, and suggested it would be safer for me to stay in the cordoned-off area.
The mayor was scheduled to give his speech at 8:30pm. When the time came he ascended the steps and waved to the audience at the front of the stage, which comprised only twenty or so men, women and children. Everyone else was lining up at the perimeter of the park. He stood in front of the microphone, tapped it, and made what must have been a joke, because he laughed loudly. And then he spoke at great length.
I asked Jenny whether she enjoyed what the mayor was saying, but she was too busy serving beers. She probably couldn’t hear either; amid the noise of the cordoned-off drinking area it was impossible to make out his words. Occasionally there was a moment when his voice stopped echoing around the park, and these magisterial pauses were met with ironic hollering from the queues. From a safe distance, the people of the town were demonstrating to the mayor that they believed he wasn’t very good.
The mayor is a prick, Jenny said. I asked why she disliked the mayor, but she motioned that she’d not be drawn on any political topic during work hours. Just look at him, she muttered.
As the speech was delivered, those lining for beers inside the cordoned-off drinking area settled into a murmur. They faced towards the stage with neutral stares, letting the mayor’s platitudes wash over them like a television commercial. It annoyed them to have the mayor speak during an event designed for drinking, but they were resigned to it, and might have believed the mayor was entitled to his moment, since they had been lucky enough to gain access to the drinking area.
As he droned on, I gestured to Jenny that I might have a can of beer after all. She handed me two and I edged towards the cordon to survey the festivities. From there, it was easier to understand what the mayor was saying – his speech centred around how the town was good, how it had always been good, and that it was the hard work of its citizens that made it good. The few teetotalers sitting in the grass were packing up their picnic blankets and mustering their children, squeezing between the fences of queued drinkers on their way to parked cars. Finding nothing but the queue and the evacuated grass, I wandered back to the bar and watched Jenny dole out her beers. After another fifteen minutes there, with Jenny refusing to be drawn into any light conversation, I inspected the grass again. The mayor was still offering the same commentary as before: that the town was good, and that it was the townspeople that made it good.
Jenny glared at me when I asked if the mayor’s speech would ever end. It was an indictment on my character that I noticed the speech at all. The line for cans of beer inside the cordoned-off area was longer than before, snaking around in double queues. It seemed at that moment that just about every attendee at the town’s day was lined up for something.
And then the mayor’s speech ended. A stubborn quiet lingered for a minute or so, as no one wanted to be seen to have enjoyed the mayor’s speech. A defeated animosity seemed to pervade the main area, but the official drinkers in the cordoned-off area soon caught a second wind. Many started to sing improvised songs about the town. Outside of the area, queued people dispersed and let their guard down as the band returned to the stage.
Jenny pointed as the mayor left the stage. See, she said. Now the queues will fall apart.
I could see that several men were removing their shirts despite the autumn chill. Two collaborated in the removal of a park bin from its metal frame before tossing it aside, the bin and its contents spilling across the green grass. Many other men and women started to roam around the park in search of things to destroy, while the rest stood cross-armed at the outskirts, still in rough queue formation, ready to witness the spectacle. Empty cans of soft drink were pegged, picnic mats were torn apart, celebratory banners were dismantled, tree branches were cracked from their trunks, and shirts were set alight, twirled and thrown. A monotone hymn erupted from the dispersing cordoned-off drinking area queue, resembling a more religious version of the improvised songs about the town.
It was a yearly ritual to destroy a bulk of the park’s facilities after the mayor’s speech, Jenny explained. After a full day of drinking in the sun, it was the only gesture the people could muster.
The destruction was carried out in a jovial fashion. There was no anguish in the eyes of one man who, climbing a nearby electrical pole, removed and set alight a cardboard placard celebrating the town’s day. Another woman smashed a glass bottle against a floodlight encasement, but she did so with tears of joy in her eyes, and her efforts were rewarded with encouraging hoots and hollers. No one made an effort to conceal their prohibited alcohol any longer. Instead, the people flaunted their public drinking by skolling conspicuously from two-litre bottles of bourbon and vodka. These bottles were dutifully smashed against a nearby surface once finished with.
There wasn’t actually much to destroy. According to Jenny, no one dared destroy anything which might land them in prison for a night. It was enough just to be seen to be destroying something, preferably of low value, and ideally belonging to a friend, or no one at all.
A couple of brawls had erupted in the crowd among the shirtless men. These did not appear to be good-spirited fights — the blows landed with impact and no part of the body was off-limits — but people watched with a strange, languid calm, as if only out of a sense of duty.
Jenny pointed through the chaos towards a man jeering a group of wrestling boys, a tin of some or other alcohol in his fist. It was Steve Sanders.
Now would be a good opportunity to get the bashing over with, she said. It would be sensible because, according to Jenny, fights at the town’s day were more likely to be light-hearted. I might even get off with just a few hard punches to the gut. There were too many other people — and she waved at the drunks — eager to put up a solid fight. Steve Sanders would quickly get fed up with me and go for someone stronger and more combative. He might even respect me for wanting to get involved in the fights. She added that she would call an ambulance if he made a mess of me.
I could not make out his face from that distance, and his clothing or posture didn’t stand out among the other men of the town. He wore a blue shirt, presumably with a national flag on its front like so many others, and a pair of blue jeans.
I knew it was inevitable that Steve Sanders would bash me if I approached him. Though I was about to go seek out the bashing, I secretly knew that I could hide among the patrons in the cordoned off area if I lost my nerve. As I pushed through the queue and out of the cordoned off drinking area, Rob tried to approach me. I ignored him, fixing my stare on the man Steve Sanders.
As I reached the wrestling boys a large tattooed man picked another up and dropped him on his head, prompting horrible jeers from the crowd. The band stopped, leaving a shameful silence. Those who had witnessed this act of violence levelled accusations at one another, shifting the blame, and the mirth turned ugly. Four policemen emerged from nowhere and started to corral the drinkers who were closest to the incident.
Someone always has to go too far, Rob said, suddenly by my side. He was drinking from a longneck of beer, but did not seem very drunk. He told me things went too far every year, each time in a different way. The year before someone had thrown a broken bottle at the band. Before that,
someone had set a tree on fire. Ten years ago, someone had tossed a dog onto the roof of the petrol station. Rob waved towards the closest petrol station. Destruction and chaos is in their blood, he said as I took a sip from his beer. But mostly they’re a tranquil bunch.
Soon enough the park was deserted, save for those in the cordoned-off drinking area.
*
On subsequent visits to the townhouse Ciara never mentioned my book, but we still had meaningless discussions in the kitchen as I prepared dinner. Usually I ate boiled spiral pasta with grated zucchini and some mushrooms. Sometimes I would also add cheese.
Ciara hosted a weekly show on the local community radio station. Every Thursday night at 10pm she would sit alone for two hours and play what she termed “mysterious music”. She was open to requests if anyone cared to call, but no one ever listened to the community radio station, she said, and besides, its music library only featured obscure country music performed by elderly Australian men.
Hers was the only show hosted by a young person, she claimed. Everyone else at the station was old and they all played the same music. Between the playing of country music songs they all spoke at length, very slowly, about each of the country music songs they played. Or else they would play popular AM radio classics, the likes of which were permanently playlisted on the local commercial AM station.
Little wonder no one listens to 2MCL FM, Ciara said.
The community radio station was rife with internal politics. Ciara was caught between factional disputes: one side was adamant that the radio station should remain exactly as it was, while the other faction, despite hosting shows no different to their opponents, believed the station should welcome young people in order to secure the frequency’s future. The latter happened to boast the station president among them, Wendy Rogers, and it was this detail that secured Ciara her show in the first place.
It quickly dawned on Ciara that no one listened to the radio station. Not even her friends would listen to her show. For a while she would call her friends and relatives at random to plead for them to tune in, just so she knew she was talking to someone. But it was obvious no one did tune in, and fair enough too: the station’s signal was very weak. Ciara could only receive it at home if she held the aerial of the radio in her bedroom at an uncomfortable angle towards her ceiling.
Surely it is worth fiddling with an aerial in order to hear someone you know on the radio, Ciara said. If she could hear someone she knew well on the radio — someone aside from the old people at the station — she would listen very closely every week. Imagine all you can learn from listening to someone on the radio, she sighed. You might discover a secret side to them.
Ciara had no ambitions to be a professional broadcaster. Her applying for a voluntary hosting role was the result of a particular radio show that had aired at midnight every Friday when she was a child. This radio show, she said, had specialised in music that was impossible to obtain. It was the most mysterious music she had ever heard.
The announcer had never shared his name. Ciara would spend an hour before the show fiddling with the aerial in order to listen with the clearest signal possible. Talking to me, she could barely remember anymore the way the music had sounded, mainly because there was nothing now to compare it to. Some people would probably argue that it wasn’t music at all that he had played, but instead just noise.
The announcer hadn’t sounded mysterious, though. He’d just sounded like a regular town man with a regular nasal local accent, probably in his fifties, maybe even older. He’d had the same lazy, benevolent air of all the other elderly broadcasters, except the music he’d played was alien. As a girl Ciara would sit on the carpet next to her bed and listen with her eyes closed. It had been possible to visit unknown lands with the aid of these strange sounds. She’d been able to see locations and structures the likes of which her own mind, even in dreams, could never conjure alone.
The announcer had never talked about the music, or even named the songs. Ciara could remember what he’d said between each song: “You’re listening to 2MCL FM, the program is Friday Night Sounds, the time is after midnight and I’ll be with you until 3am. I hope you’re having a pleasant Friday evening.” If there was a supporter drive going then he’d explain the fees and benefits, and if there happened to be a major town event, say the Grosvenor Street fire, he’d make small mention of it – maybe dedicate his strange music to whoever was affected, but that was all.
It’s very easy to know everything there is to know about the town, Ciara told me. She knew every street and who lived in all of the houses. She believed it wasn’t possible to learn anything new about the town at all. Apart from regular gossip about men cheating on women, pub brawls, and who did and did not do drugs, no events ever occurred that were likely to be remembered.
She sometimes doubted Friday Night Sounds had ever aired at all. Had she imagined it? When she’d described the music to the manager at Sanity, he’d said the music couldn’t be real. The sounds she had described were not the type people bothered putting on a CD, he’d said. When she’d tried talking to Wendy Rogers about the mysterious show, the station manager said it was before her time and that the former manager, Reg Gardner, had died five years ago from a stroke. None of the old people at the station remembered Friday Night Sounds, Ciara said, because they were all too old.
During the first few weeks doing her Thursday night show, Ciara had spent every spare minute rifling through the station’s files for evidence of Friday Night Sounds. She’d never found anything. She’d even appealed to listeners for information regarding the host but the phone never rang: no one ever listened to 2MCL FM, after all.
During the first two months of her show she’d played music from CDs she’d brought from home, music popular among young people of the town. She would reference happenings in the town she believed might be of interest to young people, and she would occasionally invite local bands to send their demos in. None did, until she put up a notice in several of the town pubs. After that she received a handful of cassettes, mainly by metal bands, and mainly featuring cover versions of popular metal songs. For a long time she played these tapes exclusively, despite their unlistenable quality, because they were something she could play that no one else would. There was no objection from the other members of the station to what she played, because none of them ever listened to it.
Eventually Ciara got to talking with a man known around town as Raz. He played guitar in a metal band called Folical Dysfunktion. He was happy that she played his cassette regularly, and Ciara was happy too. If there were strange new things to learn in the town, she would likely learn them in the company he kept.
No one in the town’s metal music scene ever performed live in public. Instead, they rehearsed in their bedrooms or garages and sometimes recorded themselves onto cassette using the built-in microphone on their stereo systems. One night Raz had invited Ciara to a house party at his, where he promised she would be able to see at least two of the town’s metal bands in action.
Raz lived in the poor area near the gasworks. When Ciara arrived, the Sepultura album Roots was playing, and nearly a dozen men and three or four women were sitting around on couches smoking and drinking rum and Coke. Some of the men were much older, in their late twenties and early thirties, but they’d still behaved like she had always expected metal enthusiasts would. They’d stood with cans of liquor in their fists, swaying to the music, occasionally air guitaring and very regularly bursting into headbanging motions when especially heavy parts of a song came on.
Ciara said she was made to feel welcome, because the metal people were eager to get the message out about their bands. They had a theory that record industry representatives from the city listened to regional radio stations in order to uncover hidden talent. She’d doubted this, but was young enough at the time to take their word for it. And anyway, there was no way to gauge how many listeners she had, despite the always-silent studio telephone.
As the hou
se party wore on the metal people had become more and more drunk. They’d huddled in circles and banged their heads to songs they liked. Raz had went into the backyard and smashed a plastic chair to pieces while everyone cheered him on. One woman had scratched an inverted crucifix into her thigh with a razor blade, and then got naked. Glasses were smashed regularly, whether purposefully or by accident Ciara couldn’t be sure. It was a very wild party, the likes of which she had never known could occur in a town like hers.
The group had gotten drunk quickly, their voices growing louder and the conversations more affectionate and antagonistic. Feeling out of her element, Ciara had retreated to a bean bag and gazed up at the strange gothic posters which hung from every wall in the house, advertising bands she had never heard of, playing in towns she had never visited. The smell of marijuana and the sweet scent of rum, emanating from the pores of each of the men, had made her feel like she was transcending the town.
Raz had closely cropped black hair and many piercings on his face. Ciara said that he was a violent man. It wasn’t that he was physically aggressive to other people, she said, but he was very eager to destroy things. Sometimes in the middle of a group hug he would become so emotional that he’d reach out to the nearest empty bottle and throw it out an open window, then cheer when he heard it shatter on the concrete. It was something the music seemed to prompt him to do because it was so powerful. It was not enough for him to passively listen to it: he needed his body to reflect it in some way. He would often grab the skin around his eyes and pull downwards during very intense moments of songs. During calmer moments of songs he would tap his leg nervously as if urging the louder parts to arrive sooner. He would sometimes sing along to the screaming parts of songs, but in a whisper, and watching his face was like watching a madman bludgeon a person to death. When he smoked bongs he did so in a manner that suggested he was going to die if he did not inhale as deeply as possible.
The Town Page 6
