On the way to Ciara’s house the sun went down and a light rain set in. Though it was Friday evening, there were few people in the pubs or restaurants and no one else in the street. At night, when the shop signs shone and the traffic lights blinked, the town seemed unusually alive, even though no one walked the streets. The night lights, scarce though they were, encouraged the idea that there were secrets to be learned about the town in the hours after sunset.
Ciara lived in a second-storey flat at a cross-street overlooking a petrol station. She poured us both beer into schooner glasses and we sat on the balcony, looking at the desolate town. For a long time we didn’t talk about anything interesting. Ciara talked about the petrol station across the road because that was what we were looking at. Then she talked about the church opposite the petrol station, and then the small park opposite that, and then the pub opposite that. There was a lot she had witnessed in this small vicinity, during her life spent in the town.
When there was nothing left in our field of view to describe, Ciara fell silent. We replenished our glasses and I drank deeply, hoping to find the courage to broach the topic of my book. Ciara slouched in her chair, studying a loose thread on her sleeve. She did not look like anyone else in the town.
I bet Rob is roaring drunk by now, she said, lighting a cigarette.
I asked her why she was in love with Rob, but she said she wasn’t. She was only experimenting with what it was like to have a boyfriend.
Men are depressing, she told me, if I didn’t mind her saying so.
I agreed.
She intended to break up with him in two months. It was her plan to be his girlfriend for exactly six months. If no compelling reason to stay with him emerged during that time — which it hadn’t yet — then she had promised herself she would break up with him.
I thought that was fair enough.
After a while, she asked me where I was from. I thought about it for a while. I tried to trace the highways east and west of the town in my mind, but my memory faltered at the shimmer. I could see the fields of canola but not the roads, and I vaguely remembered sadness in shallow hills and burned-off paddocks. Thinking deeper, I could sense evidence of contempt inside me that I no longer understood. I had definitely come from somewhere, but where? These were memories just around the corner somewhere, almost within reach of full recollection. I remembered shades but no shapes, feelings but no locations.
I told Ciara that I didn’t know where I was from.
She thought that was fair enough.
I went to buy more longnecks because we had run out. Arriving back at her flat, I found Ciara cooking instant noodles in the kitchen. Most of the walls in her flat were covered with makeshift, ceiling-high shelves bolted into the plaster, shelves full of unmarked cassette tapes. Every bench top and table surface was piled with cassette tapes too — boxed and unboxed, some with their dark brown entrails unspooled. Any parts of walls not lined with shelves of tapes were plastered with posters for secret concerts, though I recognised none of the bands or venues.
Ciara admitted to me when I asked that the posters were fake. Each was for a so-called secret show, and each poster invited people to ring her at the radio station for details of the event. She tore one off the wall and handed it to me.
The poster depicted a broad plain under a stormy sky. A large smudged moon floated to the left, near the band list, which comprised four lines of nonsensical text. She said she was always drawing grassy plains. Always a plain, always at nighttime, always with a moon at one side. It was a vision she sometimes saw briefly before sleep, appearing for a split second and then disappearing, and no matter how much she concentrated she could not evoke it deliberately. It occurred to her at random, and had for a long time.
I studied the picture. The drawing was primitive, yet the charcoal lines stirred a faint memory within me.
I wondered aloud if her vision was maybe the site of a disappeared town, gently steering the conversation in the direction of my book. Maybe everyone mourns disappeared towns. Maybe in the disappeared towns everything was exactly as people believe things are now. When you think of a disappeared town you can only believe what is widely held to be true for all towns, I announced. There can be no sordid truths, and nothing can be said by any of its inhabitants to defy the assumption that the town was good. You can deposit your good faith in disappeared towns. You can treat them as evidences that this town, and all of the other towns, and maybe even the city, were born of virtue. And that’s especially important for you, I said, since your town has no history or basis for its pride at all. It’s why the town culture is, in truth, nothing at all, or everything at once. We might not know exactly what defines it until it disappears.
When I finished my lecture, it was only a matter of seconds before I felt remorseful.
Ciara’s noodles were so overcooked they’d turned into a gluggy soup, but she made a point of draining them anyway, and offered me a serving straight from the pan, since she only owned one bowl.
It’s just a plain, she said eventually.
2
THE DISAPPEARING TOWN
The town had been getting larger over the years. It had stretched for as long as the people living there could remember, reaching outwards towards the shimmer, but falling short of a breach.
It was possible to approach the town from several directions, but only two counted, and the edges at both sides led into entirely different towns. The roads were the same, and the people were the same — it was the same town — but the vantage point mattered above all else, during the moments when a commuter would form their impressions. The first petrol station encountered would be the town: it would teach you all that was seemingly important about the town.
The petrol stations had changed throughout the years. As the prices increased on the signs out front and as the petroleum company emblems became more lurid, you would expect the town to be there for good. But it was another town on the road to some other town, or maybe a city, in one of the directions. Maybe it was just a highway. Perhaps the town at the edge of the road was not a town at all, but just a threadbare fabric of homes and shopfronts, sprinkled with petrol stations and stitched together by roads, where people happened to live.
*
With the money earned at Woolworths I accrued a pile of books and CDs. Every item I purchased, no matter which genre or style, seemed impossibly remote from my environment. None contained any of the moods or thoughts that might occur to someone living in the town.
The lives I found in these books and the sentiments I heard in the music belonged to regions carefully monitored and understood. The sentences and lyrics referred to conditions one could easily imagine encountering, by accident, at some unspecified time later in life. The existence of these situations in books and songs seemed to render them inevitable, because books and songs are about life – but nothing so crisply logical or neatly profound ever actually happened in the town.
On certain nights after my evening shifts the town would be drunk. The town would be drunk because it was Thursday, Friday or Saturday night, and sometimes I wanted to be drunk, too. The town got drunk in a listless way on these uneventful evenings, aware that every night would be forgotten. Or else the night would eventually meld into a final, vague memory of how it felt to be drunk in the town during that particular period in one’s life.
During the moments when I peered into the windows of the main street pubs I wondered whether anyone was truly part of the town. Every weekend had the mood of a last hurrah; everyone drank as though they were departing for far-off destinations the next morning. That’s how it seemed – and what else could they be drinking to? They drank like it was their duty. I suppose they were drinking to the fact that they were there.
In books and songs people gather and drink for reasons, and their lives bull-rush towards moments of importance. In these books and songs, meaninglessness is depicted too deliberately, and often hinted to have an origin or logic. The people in th
e town lived as if they would never die, but they were not heroic or foolish like in books and songs. They were only there. They seemed to understand better than anyone else that they were only there.
*
My book about the disappearing towns of the Central West of New South Wales underwent a series of dramatic changes during the period when I was still hopeful that I would finish it. I had taken to heart the little Ciara had said about my book. For a period I was certain that I could sweep away her opinions, just consider them uninformed, but when I finally assessed the matter I realised it was impossible to write a book about already-disappeared towns.
The path of least resistance was to write a book about the town instead, because it was a subject I was capable of researching first hand. So I started writing this book about the town one evening after my Woolworths shift, and called in sick to work for several nights in order to do justice to the energy I had found. Later, after listening to dictations of all I had written during that period of fervour, I felt elevated by a sensation I had never felt before. I believed that perhaps I would be able to write something correct about the town. Perhaps I would eventually complete a book featuring facts and impressions that not only I, and not only the people of the town, but potentially many other people, would be willing to accept as true.
But as the weeks passed, my vision of what the book would be inevitably soured. I began to feel a sensation of indescribable and unaccountable dread. I could not determine the origin of the dread, and it only seemed sensible to examine it from a distance, while shelving products at the supermarket. Dread seemed an important — albeit absent — feature in my book when I was not actively writing sentences, but as time passed I came to believe that it was important to pursue it in the text itself. After all, maybe everyone shared my feeling that the town was headed towards doom. Maybe the town would need to revise its notion of what it was.
*
A hole appeared in the town. One evening Rob lingered in the kitchen doorway as I was cooking my pasta. Eventually I acknowledged he was there, which prompted him to tell me about the hole.
There’s a hole in the town, he told me. Everyone was going crazy about it. In the central park, near the town hall, where the town day’s festivities were always held, there was a large hole, roundish, about two square metres at the mouth. It didn’t seem to go anywhere.
The police had already gone to study the hole. They had set up yellow tape and would not permit anyone to get close to it. Nevertheless it was easy to see the hole from a distance because it was not a simple hole, not the kind that is dug with a shovel. Rather, it was a blankness in the turf, a blankness which appeared to have depth in every possible direction. It was more of an absence than a hole, neither black nor dark nor any other colour or shade. A part of the world had apparently just vanished.
Jenny was annoyed about the hole. She thought that someone, or some people, were digging malicious holes. Why would anyone dig a hole in the park, she wondered. Kids and drunks could fall in and break their necks.
When I explained to Jenny that the hole was not a typical kind of hole, she refused to budge. Strange hole or not, someone had dug it, and if someone had dug it, it was because they hated the town. This is what the Town Extremists must have been cooking up, she muttered.
The hole was a talking point around town, and much of what was said echoed Jenny’s sentiments: that it wasn’t just a hole but something more malicious. A small minority, like Rob, believed it to be something supernatural.
Rob told me, as if referring to the worst of all crimes, that he’d spoken to a couple of people who’d stuck their arms and legs in the hole. They’d reported that it was no conventional hole: they’d said that anything that passed the threshold of the hole dematerialised. Someone had wondered if it might have been possible to dive into the hole and then swim away and up, far away from the entry point, and never return to the surface again.
It was less a hole than a portal, Rob wagered. It was possible that whatever was inside the hole was bigger than the town itself, maybe even the planet.
Rob and his friends all drank too much beer for me to take their word as fact, so I revisited the hole alone one Thursday night after my shift. The police weren’t concerned enough about the hole to patrol it day and night – after all, it was just a hole. Yet when I arrived, many teenagers from the McDonald’s car park were pegging objects at it from behind the yellow tape – beer bottles, cigarette lighters, fast food trash, and, at one point, a car radio wrenched from a nearby ute. There was a strange silence as they the tossed objects in. Nothing landed.
When the dozen-strong group realised my presence they fell silent. I pointed at the hole, and they stepped back to allow me a solitary moment with it. I had brought a curtain rod to test the depth of the hole. A voice jeered from the outskirts of the group, and then there were a few awkward giggles, and then there was silence.
Under the dim park lights, shrouded by a canopy of oaks, it was difficult to ascertain the colour of the hole. It definitely wasn’t a rich black. It seemed to be like the colour seen behind closed eyelids. The hole’s mouth resembled a pool rather than an entry point, in the way it merged with the surrounding terrain, and when I jabbed the rod into the hole the submerged length seemed to disappear altogether. I was not looking at a hole: I was looking at nothing at all. I retrieved the rod, plunged it in again, deeper, and when it hit nothing I almost tumbled in. The teenagers cheered as I regained my balance.
It’s not your typical hole, one of the kids warned. Others murmured in the affirmative. I laid down flat at the edge of the so-called hole, shoved the curtain rod in, and then lifted it up towards the sky, but it raised no further than the perimeter would allow. Perhaps the hole was an entry point to something bigger, maybe a wide underground chasm, the dimensions of which were impossible to judge. Or maybe it was nothing at all.
The teenagers seemed relieved that I, an idiot out-of-towner, had dared break the yellow tape to get closer to the hole. One girl pushed through the crowd and tossed a bundle of rope towards me. Give this a go, she said. I grabbed one end and dropped the bundle into the hole. I felt no dull thud; the rope was neatly taut when it had fully unravelled.
It must go forever, then, the teenage girl said.
It took a whole minute to wind the rope back in. It was not dirty, nor did it show any other evidence of having met with a surface of any kind. When I reported this observation to the crowd none seemed impressed or surprised. It’s not your typical hole, one said again.
That week Rob would regularly bring up the topic of the hole. He wasn’t moved by my experience, and pretended that my discoveries were long established fact. He seemed determined to never know the truth about the hole – he only sought confirmation that the hole was not a typical hole. The question of what could have caused it was never discussed to any meaningful extent.
I’ve not seen anything like it in my whole life, Rob would say. Then we would stand in the kitchen for minutes at a time, making the same observations and repeating the same eyewitness reports in the hope that one of us might suddenly recall some new detail about the hole.
It’s probably an environmental disaster, he would conclude, always seeming relieved.
The police tended to the hole lazily, occasionally replacing the yellow tape and infrequently circling the park in their paddywagons. It seemed that most people in the town were satisfied to write it off as a typical, if unusually deep, hole. It was only the teenagers, and the drunks, and the townsfolk predisposed to wonder, who relished discussing it. Teenagers continued to gather in the park in droves, while drunks in the old man pubs blandly speculated over who had dug it, usually deciding that it was someone who despised the town.
Even Ciara was reluctant to believe the hole was in any way mysterious, until one day when we visited it together after several hours spent distributing cassette tapes.
It’s definitely not your typical hole, she said. It was mid-afternoon and ther
e were no teenagers about. Only an old man and his mongrel stood at the edge of the yellow tape.
The hole was not a hole, I told Ciara. It was nothing. It wasn’t that the earth had been removed and placed somewhere else: it had simply disappeared. I told her that we might have been looking at the first chunk of disappearance, and that it was unlikely to be the last.
I saw annoyance in Ciara’s face. She had probably become fed up with my continual talk about my book. She might have thought I was trying to use the hole to my advantage. She might have thought I was trying to prove the point of my book.
It’s logical, I told Ciara. The town had appeared for no apparent or recorded reason, and so it would disappear for no apparent or anticipated reason. Yet despite the town having no reason, somewhere along the way it established a notion of itself, and this endured without resistance. That is why the town is a town. But it’s not enough to be in a place for no reason, I said. There must be a reason, and if there must be a reason, it should be a good one. The logic was so foolproof that it was no surprise to me, upon closer analysis, that the town had started to disappear.
That’s a very artistic way of putting it, Ciara said, and tossed a cassette tape into the hole.
*
Ciara told me there were other holes in town, but all their origins were known. For many years, a group of teenagers had spent most weekday afternoons excavating a vacant plot of land located between a disused nightclub and one of the highway petrol stations. From the street, graffitied wooden boards hid this muddy commercial lot that had come to resemble a fledgling mining operation. Some of the dirt mounds were so high they were visible from the street, and old enough that grass had sprouted on their peaks. One afternoon Ciara led me through a hole in the back fence into the heart of the operation, where half a dozen boys and girls in their early teens shovelled dirt onto their own personal hills.
The Town Page 8
