Some time before, when Ciara was the same age as the diggers, she herself had spent a couple of months aiding the operation. For teenagers of a certain persuasion, it was the place to be. If you weren’t satisfied with the town, but couldn’t pinpoint what was unsatisfactory about it, digging holes was what you ended up doing.
The teenagers didn’t pay us much attention as we wandered the roped paths between their digs. Each hole had a bucket next to it and each bucket was empty, save one girl near the nightclub who had unearthed a fountain pen.
They’re digging for artefacts, Ciara said. They’re looking for evidence of something. It’s a natural impulse among young people. Before she’d met the metal music fans, and before she’d started publishing her magazine, she had spent her afternoons in the vacant lot digging. It was an interesting thing to do, because no one knew what kind of treasure awaited beneath the soil, although surely there must have been something.
According to Ciara, the elderly of the town were always saying things weren’t what they used to be, or else describing great characteristics of the town that no longer seemed to be true. Frowning at one of the vacant lot’s holes, Ciara insisted that she had never searched for evidence of any of that. Maybe she had intended to prove that none of it was true, and that things hadn’t changed for the worse after all.
She knelt and picked up a shard of cement. She did often wonder what they dug for. Was it possible that everything good about the town was a thing of the past? Ciara first visited the digs when she was twelve, and had hoped the operation was about discovering the secrets of the town, but the truth was different: there didn’t seem to be any motive among the teenagers, they simply dug because others had dug before them. The meaning of the digging had been lost along the way, and Ciara suspected there might not have been a meaning to begin with. Besides, it barely mattered anyway — and she motioned towards the contemporary diggers — because there was satisfaction to be derived from it.
Everything about the town rested on belief, Ciara believed, but whose belief could they trust? Certainly no one older than us, she said. The diggers didn’t care about Anzac day yet, nor Australia Day, nor the town’s day. They would though, one day, and that’s why they’d stop digging. Once they’d acquired a taste for less important things, they would become a part of the town.
The girl with the exhumed fountain pen stopped digging. She stared, but was chastened when Ciara picked up the pen. She waited for an assessment, slapping the dirt from her hands onto her thighs.
The pen was marked in gold with the word ‘Cadia’, with a phone number and a little picture of a gleaming nugget. Ciara surmised that there had been a gold mine around town in the olden days, and this vacant block of land had been its headquarters.
The girl looked disappointed. Obviously various shops and offices had existed there in the past. What else could there have been, she said, between the old nightclub and a petrol station? She didn’t believe it was an exciting conclusion at all, but Ciara did, or at least she pretended to. It was a small clue towards solving the mystery of the mines. Though there was definitely no need to stop digging, because there might be even more to find.
It’s just a pen, the girl retorted. She retrieved a crumpled document from her pocket, listing a dozen or so business names they’d found on fountain pens. Some business names were accompanied by sketched logos and mascots. Just a bunch of companies: real estates, solicitors, accountants.
When Ciara was a digger she only made one interesting discovery. She’d dug over near the petrol station every afternoon. Sealed in a plastic bag, her discovery was a professionally printed magazine called Foreseen. It was full of images of horizons, most likely horizons in the area, she guessed. They were relatively flat expanses, sometimes with a calmly sloping hill.
There was no text in the magazine, but one image endured in her memory. It was the only image featuring a tree. At first she had assumed the images were drawings or paintings, because the emptinesses had an alien quality. This image with the tree, though — a stripped gum standing in the distance slightly to the right — was chilling because it confirmed the images were not illustrations but in fact photographs. They were photographs of plains that seemed too still and featureless to be real. How did the photographer access this environment? And where was it?
And why would someone make a whole magazine featuring only landscape photos, and unremarkably flat ones at that? It did not seem like an artistic magazine. It was not attributed to anyone, nor did the photos seem ripe with some complex significance or motive. It felt like a product of the soil, like the dirt was memorialising itself, relishing ancient examples of its uninterruptedness.
Over time Ciara had learned of some of these mysteries in the town, such as Friday Night Sounds and this Foreseen magazine, but they belonged in the past and there was no way to retrieve them. Ask anyone in the town, she said, and they will claim that everything was better at some unspecified period in the past, and while their claims could never be substantiated it was difficult to disprove them. Any effort to make things better again seemed futile. And so she wondered, what was the point in doing anything at all? If she had children they would likely live a life more terrible than hers. If she wrote a book or made an album, or a film, it would not serve to explain the time in which she lived, because, soon enough, everyone would be dead. And before even that happened, everyone would hate her anyway, hate the town, hate everything she and they had ever stood for and didn’t stand for. She was an obvious target for such hate, because she had read articles that warned things were getting worse, whereas other people might not have read anything like that at all.
Maybe that’s why they dug: because the wick was almost burned to its end and the future would be horror. Based on what was happening on the news and what happened when she started to research the magazine Foreseen, that was what she believed. She tossed her chunk of cement away.
When she had showed Foreseen to her dad, he’d turned it in his hands and flicked through its pages, before deciding that it was some form of propaganda. He’d agreed it wasn’t art, though also believed it must have been. What else could it be? He’d said it was full of subliminal messages, and when she asked what subliminal messages could possibly be embedded in pictures of grassy horizons, he’d replied that he could not know because they were subliminal. Chances were, they had both already been infected with the messages, and while they could object to the magazine as strongly as they liked, it didn’t change the fact that they had absorbed something potentially noxious. It was too late. It was already shifting blocks around in their brains. He’d confiscated the magazine from her.
When she’d stolen it back she took the magazine to the library, where the librarian had said it was just some art. It might not be art, she’d replied. They couldn’t possibly know the intention of the person who made the magazine. When she’d asked how he was so certain it was art, he’d seemed taken aback.
He’d said it was art because it didn’t have a clear meaning. He’d supposed it did have a meaning, but based on Ciara’s inability to find one there was no question whether it was art or not: it obviously was. The librarian refused to speculate about what the meaning of this so-called art was. He had to think about it. He’d told her you have to think about art, sometimes for many consecutive days. Ciara had already thought about the magazine and had decided, based on what she could understand after many hours studying it, that it wasn’t intentionally meant to be art.
As we walked past the bottle shop Ciara lingered outside, in a manner which suggested I should buy us some longnecks. I bought four longnecks of Sheaf Stout and we walked to her flat.
The librarian had said to Ciara that it didn’t matter whether Foreseen was intentionally art or not. He’d claimed everything became art eventually. Everything in the past becomes art, but generally not of an interesting kind. He believed it was a person’s right to determine what was art and what wasn’t. He was passionate about this, arrogantl
y so, and yet he hadn’t been able to explain how he had arrived at his belief, nor why she should feel the same way.
Ciara had no luck finding someone who could tell her what the magazine Foreseen was – everyone she’d asked just concluded it was art, as if that ended the discussion. Few were happy about it being art, but all were confident that it was. She’d felt prevented from accessing the truth of what Foreseen might have been. Ciara had wanted it to not be art. She’d wanted something strange to exist that wasn’t just art.
We poured two schooner glasses of the syrupy beer and sat on her balcony.
Ciara had lost the magazine Foreseen. She swore she’d left it on her bed one morning. She’d turned the whole room over looking for it.
*
It became a routine for me to follow Ciara around as she left cassette tapes in hiding spots around town. During the early afternoon, before school broke at three, the town belonged to both the elderly and the nine-to-five chore-runners, who paid us no attention. Mothers roamed the plazas too, but they were too distracted by their young children. No one noticed as we secreted cassettes into the shopping plaza prize draws, in the folds of telephone box Yellow Pages, and among the pamphlets at the Westpac and National banks. Sometimes Ciara would wander away from the central district, into the streets of ancient townhouses and colonial homes that cost so much nowadays, and then into the modest brick and weatherboard blocks towards the tentacle roads. Ciara believed she knew the layout of each of these homes just looking at them. She claimed to know all their smells, the toast and coffee, the bleach, and sometimes the dust. The colours inside, the layouts, the floral furniture angled towards the television, the coffee tables with remote controls and NRMA magazines – it was all inevitable. Looking at the front of homes in the back streets of the town, it was easy to tell what kind of families lived inside. Rather too easy, Ciara believed.
It might be true that the Town Extremists are men and women from houses just like these, I said. Maybe they hide in plain sight, and maybe we know someone belonging to them. Perhaps Rob is a Town Extremist, I joked to Ciara. Perhaps the mayor is secretly a Town Extremist.
Ciara would happily have counted herself among the Town Extremists. There were definitely people fed up with the town, she said, but who was angry enough to sabotage it? She suspected that if there ever really were Town Extremists, they’d existed in the past, during a time when there’d seemed to be more at stake in life. No doubt there had been a handful of reasons to be a Town Extremist, back then. Whatever they had been against then – it had won. What could the town be if it wasn’t what it was, right at that moment?
Maybe Foreseen was a Town Extremist text, Ciara said. She hadn’t given much thought to the Town Extremists. She just thought it was what old people called the young, the ones who drank cask wine in the streets at night, bringing property prices down, stealing road signs and setting wheelie bins alight. They were the only Town Extremists she could point at. Mitch and Debbie at White’s Real Estate could have been Town Extremists once, she said, waving towards White’s Real Estate. As we walked down a quiet back street she pegged a cassette over a roof and into the backyard of a nearby home. As we stopped to hear it land, something appeared in the nearby gutter, close to the front wheel of a Mazda. A dark absence. Ciara squatted and dipped her arm into the hole, left it there for a moment, and then pulled it back out.
It’s not your conventional hole, she said.
Ciara and I wandered to the southern outskirts of town, like we sometimes would, where none of the tentacle roads had been paved. Across the railway line, past the gasworks and through the neighbourhood where the poor people lived, the town seemed reluctant to surrender to the countryside beyond. Past a paddock strewn with rusted old freight carriages and piles of corrugated iron, ruins of ceased construction stretched all the way to the Bunnings Warehouse on the horizon, which squatted awkwardly on the highway leading east.
How do we know when we’ve left the town, I asked Ciara. Where is the official boundary of the town, and is it visibly noticeable, or just an arbitrary line on a government map? Could it be true that we were all part of the same city, the coastal city, and that this is just part of some remote and forgotten suburb? Ciara knew of an official boundary, though. It was many hundreds of kilometres west, a long and deep stretch of mountain that served to emphasise the difference between the city and everything that lay far beyond.
As we gazed at the Bunnings, Ciara admitted she’d never been to the city. She knew that life was harder there. She knew it was more expensive. She knew you needed to be rich in the city, that you needed to be smart and ruthless, cold-blooded almost. More so now than at any time in the past, she said. That’s what her parents had warned, and even though they didn’t agree with her apocalyptic beliefs, they still appeared to believe things were getting worse.
We smoked there for a while and watched the cars on the distant highway, thin at that time of day. Then we walked back to town, in silence because it was too hot for any effort. We drank four longnecks on her balcony that night, staring at the petrol station, as Ciara related her dire predictions. An ancient Walkman connected to old computer speakers aired the delicate sound of her music over the empty crossroads.
Later we entered the teenage excavation site. Ciara dug small holes inside the larger dug ones, then dropped cassettes and buried the dirt back in. She also left copies of a small booklet created especially for the teenage diggers, but she wouldn’t permit me to read it.
*
Rob finally asked why I was spending so much time with Ciara. I replied in as matter-of-fact a tone as possible that it was because she was interested in my book about the disappearing towns. This did not seem to satisfy him. He asked directly whether I was in love with Ciara, to which I replied that I was not, and that it was offensive he would suspect it. Feigning hurt did not work on Rob, and he continued to press me on the matter, albeit in as subtle a way as he could manage. He asked what Ciara said about him, and I told him that she didn’t speak much about their relationship at all, since our conversations were largely about the contents of my book.
Ciara doesn’t care about books, he said.
As a matter of fact she does, I replied. Her favourite book was called Foreseen – it was something he should know, I insinuated, though if he didn’t like books it was only natural that they hadn’t discussed it, I also carefully insinuated.
Rob said he’d only been going out with Ciara for five months, so it was unfair to expect him to know every single thing about her. He knew more than I did, though. He knew enough to know that she needed looking after. I didn’t know her situation, and it was dangerous that I didn’t. He wouldn’t tell me her situation though, because he believed it was between him and Ciara. When I said I knew her situation he insisted I didn’t, otherwise I’d know it wasn’t wise to confide in her about stupid things like my book.
I asked Ciara what her situation was, having realised I’d never done so before, to which she replied she didn’t have one. She had moved out of her parents’ home a year ago, and since then had squatted in the flat with the balcony. In exchange for a packet of cigarettes she’d convinced an old school acquaintance turned apprentice electrician to connect the flat to the electricity grid, and so lived with little requirement for money. She stole discarded bread from the Bakers Delight loading dock every evening, and that was her diet.
She saw no point in getting involved with work. Maybe if she lived in the city, where it was possible to get an interesting job, she would see the point. In the town people inherited work from their relatives, or else they pumped petrol, or stacked shelves or beeped through groceries at the supermarkets. Or else they dug holes along the highway for the council. What was the point of any of that? She didn’t want to go to university — and she waved easterly — because there was no point learning anything that was officially true, anymore.
Rob wasn’t actually aware of Ciara’s situation. When I repeated what she’d tol
d me he seemed disturbed.
So she’s basically homeless, he said.
I replied that technically, Ciara was homeless, unemployed, and a bin scrounger to boot.
Rob said she was lying. Her parents paid her way. They lived in a mansion, apparently, and he waved towards where he believed the tentacle roads were.
Everyone lives in mansions in this town, I said. Though they’re not very expensive mansions.
Rob said she didn’t seem homeless. She was just off with the fairies a bit, like an artist. He waved at a basket of cassettes sitting in the corner of his bedroom. He found them everywhere, but didn’t have any way to play them. And anyway, he didn’t mind that she was into all that stuff. He believed he could help her, look after her, all of that. He could have been going out with a normal woman, but instead he chose Ciara. His life was an example for her. It would rub off eventually, and she would see the sense in just getting on with it. He was trying to help her, whereas I — and he pointed at me — only wished to indulge her childish side. Look at you, a man of your age working as a packer at the supermarket and writing a book. You don’t even know what your book is about, and half the time you’re out talking about your book with Ciara rather than writing it.
He told me I was wasting my life, that I was a lonely person writing a stupid book. No one would ever read it, and I wouldn’t even have a wife or a kid who could pretend to like it. And anyway, what if I never finished it? What if I never finished anything? He said I probably wouldn’t, because the book was incompletable unless I just made stuff up. No one buys books anymore, no one is interested in non-existent towns, no one is interested in whatever I, in particular, had to say about them. It was just a lifestyle. I was too cowardly to live like everyone else because at some point, someone probably told me I was better than everyone else. I belonged in the city with all the other tryhards, not in the town. We in the town just get on with it.
The Town Page 9
