Ciara didn’t fall in love with Raz, but she’d been interested in being his girlfriend because she had never met someone so intense. He was not handsome, and they would no doubt have a terrible life together, but she’d wanted badly to be involved in things she did not understand. When his band Folical Dysfunktion started playing at the house party, she’d been careful to watch his performance as a fan, and not as someone trying to assess the group’s suitability for airplay.
She said she’d never forget one thing Raz told her: that when he got drunk he would eventually come to the realisation, late into the drinking session, that he could not inhabit the feeling forever. Eventually the party would end, and he would need to stop drinking, and eventually he would stop being drunk, and this truth would instantly drain his happiness. He would look around the room at the other people having a good time, and he would know that later in the night they would leave, go home, fall to sleep and then do other things. He wanted nothing more than to delay this moment, but its certainty haunted him.
After that first party Ciara would sometimes visit Raz’s house. Although he lived alone there were always three or four other people having a smoking session in the lounge room, either listening to music, watching TV or both. Ciara smoked bongs too, and for a long time it was her favourite thing to do. It made conversations more affectionate, she said, and it made music sound more intricate and otherworldly. The world outside of Raz’s house seemed even more boring, but it was fascinating in its boringness. She’d been able to see the whole town from a different perspective. All of a sudden, the streets and houses she had seen and known her whole life appeared to have secrets. She’d felt she understood a profound, underlying logic to everything, and figured that if the townspeople saw this logic too, they might make an effort to subvert it, somehow.
Raz would always talk about going to the city to see some or other touring metal band. On several occasions he’d promised Ciara they would go, but then as the weeks drew closer he would renege and say he had no money, or that there was no point spending money on seeing bands when that time could be better spent improving Folical Dysfunktion. Raz always talked about the city and how familiar he was with its venues and even with some of its bands. He had not been boastful, but he would often make reference to things Ciara suspected he knew little about.
Meanwhile, she’d been starting to make her show exclusively about local metal bands, which meant that the bulk of it was dedicated to the primal tape recordings of Folical Dysfunktion. It was during this period that she’d started a small magazine about the town’s metal music bands. She’d reviewed each of the demos she received, and had treated them with the same care that proper, studio-recorded music would receive in more established music magazines. She’d printed off copies of her magazine and left them in pubs, and sometimes she had lingered at the bar in order to witness someone pick up a copy and read.
Though touched, none of the metal people had taken her magazine seriously as it was too amateur, but they’d been happy to be interviewed for it. Her first interview was with Raz, who she’d described in the magazine as “the father of the town’s metal scene”. It was a very personal and revealing interview. They’d discussed many controversial topics, including Raz’s attitude towards the people of the town, the town culture, drugs, and globally popular metal bands he believed did not pass muster. But when she’d printed the magazine he’d insisted she not distribute it, because he’d been too drunk during the interview to know how silly he sounded, and he did not want to offend the global metal bands in case they should obtain a copy. She also interviewed another band, friends of Raz’s called Septic Rape, and also several other musicians in the circle who had never even recorded a cassette or played an instrument during one of Raz’s parties.
Lacking the material to sustain a regular magazine based solely around local metal bands, Ciara had started to make things up. She’d created whole scenes and communities which did not exist, but which she’d dreamed about. This had a knock-on effect, as she’d needed to play the music created by these scenes and communities on her radio station in order to verify they were real.
Eventually she’d tried to distance herself from Raz, as she thought he was too much in love with her. She had learned all there was to know about the local metal scene, and none of it seemed very promising.
To corroborate the fake reviews and interviews she’d published in her magazine, she would play strange instrumental songs on a practice organ belonging to her parents, straight to air, without any rehearsal. Then she would back-announce each song, pretending they belonged to a cultish underground society in the town. She did not name the scene, nor the band names, as in this imaginary music scene the bands refused to have names, because they refused to believe they were entitled to exist. For each song, she would choose a different sound on the keyboard and run it through an old reverb pedal found at the second hand shop. Using this method, the music would sound ghostly and distant, she said, and somewhat similar to the music played on Friday Night Sounds back in the day.
Raz wouldn’t let go. He would always call her at the radio station, even though she had told him to stay away. He had become obsessive, Ciara said, and would often raise his voice at her, frustrated that she refused to be his girlfriend. Raz believed this new “keyboard scene”, as he’d termed it, had “stolen” her from his friend group, and he wanted to know who was in the scene and where they hung out. She’d lied that these tapes were sent to her anonymously.
Inevitably Raz turned up at the station premises. Being a community station that no one ever listens to, or even knows exists, there was no security nor any locks on the door. He’d stormed in and immediately saw Ciara’s practice organ set up next to the mixing desk. Her secret had been discovered, but Ciara said she didn’t feel ashamed. In fact, she was glad someone would finally see that it was her behind the keyboard scene all along. No one had ever suspected anything anyway, she supposed, since no one ever listened to her radio station or read her magazine.
Raz called her a slut, since he was very poor at expressing himself despite regular assurances during their relationship that he was in touch with his emotions. He did not lay a finger on Ciara or her keyboard, but instead left happy in the knowledge that she was not potentially sleeping with anyone in the keyboard scene, since it did not really exist.
Ciara thought it had all blown over until a couple of weeks later, when she’d received the first cassette ever submitted directly to her station pigeonhole. The cassette featured music very similar to her keyboard songs — simple childlike melodies made dreamy and dark thanks to lots of reverb and echo. She’d known it was Raz. She’d known he was trying to ingratiate himself with her because he loved her more than even his own life, as he never failed to remind her.
But the tapes had kept turning up, she said, and the handwriting on the mailbags was always different. The keyboard settings also seemed to vary dramatically, and she’d noticed slight differences in the amount of reverb and echo applied to each. In short, if Raz was pulling a trick on her, he was doing a very good job. Ciara didn’t think Raz was smart enough, or musically talented enough, to pull off a trick that well.
It all made sense, or made even less sense, when Raz died. He’d thrown himself in front of the freight train and that was that: no more Raz. Nevertheless the cassettes kept arriving, and the music seemed to become more intricate and refined, until she’d started to believe that people might enjoy listening to them. Despite weekly attempts to contact these musicians directly, both on air and via fliers left in the pubs, Ciara had never made contact with any of the creators. Nevertheless, an endless supply of atmospheric keyboard music kept pouring into her pigeonhole. It could only have been produced by people in the town, she guessed, as it was difficult enough to find the frequency downtown, let alone anywhere else.
Ciara still reviewed the tapes in her magazine, except she was no longer making the artefacts up: they actually existed. She said she was ca
pable of finding things in the music not already in her mind. Since none of the tapes had artist names or song titles, her magazine had become a catalogue of images and descriptions for music that was not accessible to anyone except listeners in her town. Someone, or many people, had heard her strange keyboard songs and chosen to follow in her footsteps. They must have been in the town, she said, but where?
Ciara had known everything about the town. She’d known each of its streets and every single one of its faces. She’d known what everyone liked, and she’d known what kind of things they did in their spare time. She’d known the types of cuisine they preferred, and she’d known what made them happy and the things that made them sad. The town was boring and annoying, Ciara said.
But she still hadn’t known who was sending her the strange music. Might there have been other people out there trying to transcend the town? Or else, maybe people from the city were playing tricks on her. Maybe Ciara was famous in the city, or in another town with industrial-strength radio signals.
She never received requests or telephone calls during her radio show, but she continued to receive new tapes every single day. She said it was statistically likely that hundreds of people in the town were sending her tapes, but she didn’t know who they were, nor why they did it. She couldn’t even imagine what kind of house they would live in. Did they shop at the Woolworths or work at the McDonald’s? Statistically, some of them probably did.
But I doubt they drive cars, she said.
*
One afternoon as I drank a beer Jenny made a passing reference to what she called the Town Extremists. She was conducting a postmortem on the town’s special day, repeating all that Rob had said about the population’s innocent appetite for destroying things. The annual orgy did not compare to shadier activities in the town, she said, namely the activities of people who hated the town and wanted to see it destroyed.
Jenny seemed to relish the contempt she reserved for the Town Extremists. According to her, they hated everything about the town, and yet they continued to live there. Not many people knew about the Town Extremists, but she did because she worked in a pub.
Jenny had become comfortable enough in my company to explain the blander aspects of the town — for example the football teams and the goings on at other, more popular pubs — but when it came to matters critical of the town she behaved as if I were trying to trick her into complaining.
According to Jenny the Town Extremists were hard-done-by anarchists. Even though they lived in the town and enjoyed all the benefits of being in the town, they hated it with a fiery passion. Jenny didn’t know why they hated the town. They were just punks, malcontents, fools, or criminals.
She believed the Town Extremists were an organisation, rather than a disparate group of disaffected people. They might have held meetings to plot their next hateful move, whether it be petty acts of graffiti or full blown political orchestrations.
There was no doubt that it was a gang of some sort, she claimed. Their main yearly focus was the town’s day, where they caused all manner of chaos, and she waved towards where the chaos had occurred. She’d seen a few of them loitering around the cordoned-off drinking area, scowling at the town and all it had achieved. They were always the ones who took things too far.
I was interested in tracking down the Town Extremists, but did not know where to find them. Rob didn’t know about the Town Extremists, Ciara said they didn’t exist, and Tom the bus driver acted surprised and insisted that he didn’t live in the town — only around it — and that he was not concerned with town gossip any longer.
Don’t ask me about specifics of the town, Tom said, because I no longer live there.
The librarian did know about the Town Extremists, but was adamant they didn’t exist. The people in the town dream of resistance, he said. If there was a resistance, it would mean their existence was important to some other people, and that is what the town wants above all things.
Seated at the Michel’s Patisserie across from the Big W, the librarian motioned at the people in the town, explaining. When someone dared mention something nice about another town, the people of the town would devise a response that made their own town seem better. If you pushed them hard enough, they would become violent in their defence of the town. It was only the young people who suspected the town was not all it was cracked up to be, but once they realised the rest of their lives would be spent there they’d rethink their attitude towards it.
It’s true that there’s no reason the town is here, he told me. There was no founder, there was no strange or noble history that the people could marvel at. The earliest recorded memory of the town was that lots of cattle died during the drought of the 1930s.
Whenever there was a drought, he said, people liked to point out that it could not possibly be as bad as the drought of the 1930s, even though droughts were getting worse. A drought could almost be as bad as the one from the 1930s — it could threaten to rival this worst drought — but no one dared suggest that it surpassed it. To do so was considered disrespectful.
As far as the townspeople were concerned, he told me, the town was more perfect in the past than it appeared to be now – in its ability to withstand tragedy and thus be noble. It was a comfort that events had occurred deserving of being remembered, if only by them, and if only this one particular thing. The librarian believed there was nothing noble about the town anymore. No one believed the town could have any new milestones. It could only become weaker, less charismatic, more remote from whatever made it supposedly respectable to begin with, and it was outside of their control. Who knew what kind of fate the rest of the world would impose on it, the librarian said. And yet, the more remote the town’s so called legacy became, the more passionate the townspeople were to protect and evangelise it.
The librarian was adamant I’d never understand, since I was not of the town. On the rare occasion the national news cited the 1930s drought as an example of an especially severe drought, the townspeople were proud. When the MP who died of lung collapse was mentioned as a footnote in this or that political documentary on the TV, they were relieved to discover that somebody outside of the town — maybe someone who had never even visited — was thinking about them. It proved that the town was a town, a part of a greater area or country, somehow integral to something bigger than itself. It proved that the town existed. It proved they were a component in something which could be seen from afar. And their demonstrations of pride were cries to the rest of the country, or the world, that yes, we are here, and yes, we are important, but also, that they were in no way complicit in whatever terror awaited us all.
How would the town survive without this notion that it is important, the librarian wondered. How could it survive if the truth were known, and accepted? And anyway, he believed the truth of the town was uglier than we could imagine, even if no one knew what it was.
I asked the librarian if he was a Town Extremist, by dint of his negative opinion of the town, but he only frowned at me. No one could ever actually ruin the town, he said. Town Extremists or anyone else. The town would be there forever. The future of the town is that it will just continue to be a town.
*
Originally I had hoped to drink coffee in the Michel’s Patisserie every day. It seemed to be the kind of habit strangers would keep in a town. I had hoped the waiters would remember my order and tell me stories about their day, and call me by my first name. I had hoped locals would initiate conversations about major events, and that they would draw me into their conversations with other locals, until finally I was part of a clique of decent townspeople. But I was not interesting to the people in the town. No one wondered where I had come from, and no one asked why I was there. I was just someone they didn’t know. I did not meet new people in the Michel’s Patisserie as I had hoped. Instead, I listened to people I had met elsewhere complain about the town while sitting in it.
One particular time at the Michel’s Patisserie is memorable, because it
was the afternoon before the first night I spent drinking beer with Ciara. She came to where I was sitting, bearing a plastic bag full of cassette tapes which she was distributing to secret locations around the town.
Ciara took a seat but did not order a coffee. It was silly to drink coffee at the Michel’s Patisserie, she said, as the shop’s specialties were pastries and cakes, not coffee. She carefully hid a cassette under a pile of coasters, then placed a sugar jar on top, and then shielded the tape from view with a plastic menu.
I told Ciara that Rob was drinking with his friends at the Grosvenor Hotel. I knew that they would not stop drinking until the game was over, at which point they would have post-game drinks. Ciara was aware but not interested; she was browsing the social pages in the local newspaper. The spread was packed with images of similar-looking men and women, all smiling at the camera unguardedly, dressed casually but in a manner which suggested they had put much thought into how they appeared. If the photos were real, then the people in the town had their nights in a jovial yet civilised fashion. Sometimes a man or woman would look more inclined to joke about the situation than others, but for the most part the people in the photos were politely attentive, as if in some form of dialogue with the next day’s reader. You couldn’t imagine them being anywhere else and they appeared to believe they belonged there, during that moment when the photographer decided they were emblematic of the town. Their faces inadvertently mocked me. The photos consecrated their belonging: made them historically and verifiably of the town.
I finished my coffee and accepted Ciara’s invitation to help distribute the cassette tapes. We placed tapes in the central park’s pergola, in the Commonwealth ATM foyer, at the foot of the Coles plaza escalator, between bowsers at the bottom BP, next to the windscreen wiper bucket at the middle Ampol, and among the newspapers at the Parkview pub, where we also picked up some longnecks from the bottle shop. Ciara wanted to have a beer after a job well done, and I wanted to stay with her in case she had anything to say about my book.
The Town Page 7
