Besides, there was a more compelling spectacle now: over in the far corner figures were blundering into the hole. I pointed this out to Ciara and she laughed, yelled that someone would have to fish them out later. Then she jumped into the crowd below, landed gently on the surface of skulls, and disappeared into the ocean of limbs.
The police had arrived outside the hall. When I peeked over the corrugated iron roof I could see two police approaching the entry, the hapless doormen buzzing in a panic around them. Soon the rooftop crowd noticed the familiar blue and red flashing lights and jumped off just as Ciara had, leaving only me and one other man on the roof. The other man was Steve Sanders, I think.
I pointed to the hole and at the people blundering into it. We should take action, I warned. We should intervene, we should work together. We’re better equipped than anyone to plan an intervention, from this tactical vantage point. The man I took to be Steve Sanders snarled, acknowledged that it was just he and I on the roof, that there was no one to watch whatever happened between us, and pushed me aside. He ran and jumped into the smoke below.
I’ll get you later cunt, he barked as he dropped, and the crowd cheered.
I crawled to the far side of the roof and dropped into the yard of a terrace below. Then I climbed another brick wall and landed onto the tarmac of a petrol station. From that distance the disco sounded like a party, remarkable only for the cries of terror that rang out occasionally, presumably from those closest to the hole. I straightened my clothing and walked as innocently as possible to the front of the building. There, a small crowd of elderly men and women wondered what the fuss was about. I felt forlorn and excluded, standing outside and away from the action.
One of the elderly women said that it sounded like that Kemp girl got what was coming for her.
The police were dragging random disco-goers out by their necks, pushing them to the curb and ignoring them as they fled. As I started to formulate a plan to gain entry back into the disco, Ciara was thrown onto the footpath by an angry doorman.
Run off, dog, he yelled at her. She grabbed my wrist and ran up towards her flat, and a block or two later the world was silent.
They’re all fighting, Ciara cried, excitedly. Not all of them, but most of them.
I said it had been obvious what was going to happen. There would be one woman getting her lights knocked out and she was doomed from the start. It had been a surprise to me that no one had come to her aid, such was her disadvantage.
She was copping it, that was for sure, Ciara agreed. Maybe it was true she didn’t know what the fuss was about.
*
The shops in the main streets were all closing. Dust set in thickly, brochures and mail littered stoops, and signs lost their colour beneath the gloom of rusted awnings. These losses did not register with the townspeople: they wandered the air-conditioned plazas, entering and exiting via escalators from dark undercover car parks.
For weeks the council patrolled the streets, boarding up all the holes they could find. At first they tried filling them with concrete from big round trucks, but the concrete never filled to the top, and they wondered whether it was even landing. Then they poured trailers and trailers of sandbags in, but there weren’t enough sandbags to fill a single hole. So they resorted to blocking the holes with boards. The thin chipboard planks they used never sat quite flush, instead appearing to float just above ground level. No matter how firmly men secured them or weighed them down, the colour of nothing leaked at the edges. And by the morning the boards had always fallen in.
The council and the town gave up. The holes would have to be a new fact for the town. The ground they had gobbled up and were continuing to gobble up was unsalvageable. They presented no serious threat.
Then they started to consume furniture, and thoroughfares, and places where people might sometimes want to stand. It was no longer possible to enter Fryer’s Antiques, near the second central petrol station, because the whole ground floor had disappeared. Not that anyone cared much, for the shop had become useless: the town was stripping back to the bare essentials required to still qualify as a place where people lived.
Any urgency to address the matter of the holes receded after weeks of hopelessly filling them in, until they were finally categorised an annoyance. Unexplainable, yes, but something people would need to accept. On the way to the Woolworths I’d often find teenagers poking at the absences with sticks. Sometimes they still dared poke their arms in.
Jenny didn’t want to hear any more talk about the holes. She hadn’t needed to worry about them because they weren’t inside her pub yet, though some shimmered on the footpath outside.
Anyway, she said, the world was always getting darker. Things much worse happened elsewhere, things too terrible for words. They say there’s a growing hole in the sky — she pointed to the sky — and because of it people will one day burn to a crisp, or else drown in rising seas. She pointed east. Or there is going to be a war, and people in cities will potentially be bombed. And there were incurable diseases borne by wind that resulted in long agonising deaths to good people like herself. All in all there were worse things going on than some Town Extremists digging especially deep holes. They could dig them wherever they wished as far as she was concerned — even in the air, even in her pub — should they dare to do so. And then she rapped a fist against her chest.
The largest hole in the town spread at the southern end of the main street, in a paved pedestrians-only avenue near the turn-off to the highway. Benches lined the footpath with a view of long abandoned shopfronts, the windows all covered with newspaper classifieds from several decades past. For years this avenue had been a sanctuary for teenagers: you could tell by the cigarette butts stamped into its eroding pavement, and the tossed Moove cartons rolling in the breeze. Now it was a shimmering abyss and the teenagers were somewhere else, maybe in the grassy wastelands that hugged the tentacle suburbs, where the view into the country was uninterrupted. They might have gazed thoughtlessly into the vastness they had yet to confront, and might never have needed to confront, were it not for the fact of the holes. As I passed the avenue one afternoon, a small boy stood at the foot of the huge hole and dipped his leg in. His parents were nowhere to be seen – it looked like he was lost. But it was impossible to be lost in the town.
A front-page story in the town’s local newspaper announced that the town disco would no longer be funded by the council. Eighteen people were missing and one was dead. They boarded the town hall up, and the PA was sold at an auction.
*
Ciara left Rob one afternoon as I sat in my room writing my book about the town. There was the sound of severe conversation in the next room, then I heard Ciara leave, and then silence.
An hour later Rob snapped and smashed everything in his room. I heard him tear his magazines to pulp. Then he must have fallen asleep, or else gone on a bender with his football friends, because for a whole day the townhouse was silent.
The next day he woke up or came home and punched a hole in the gyprock, and then went quiet. I was scared to face him, since I was a suitable target for interrogation, or even a bashing. Rather than cook my dinner in the kitchen I climbed out the window and bought a packet of chips at the corner store. Then I visited Ciara’s and knocked on her door, but there was no answer.
I made a habit of doing this for several days. On my way home from Woolworths I would visit Ciara’s with no luck. Then I would climb into my bedroom window and commence work on my book, even if I knew Rob wasn’t home. I started to prefer entering through my window — although doing so would eventually attract Rob’s attention and signal guilt.
My chief concern was whether I would ever see Ciara again. I knocked on her door every morning and afternoon, until it occurred to me that doing so might seem strange. For information on her whereabouts I supposed Rob was the only source, so after much deliberation I went home one evening through the front door. Rob was watching a football panel show on the television and d
rinking a VB longneck. He seemed too drunk to suspect me of loving Ciara, at that point. He asked if I knew where to get drugs, specifically marijuana, since he was still trying to recover from the pain of losing Ciara as a girlfriend. I told him I did not, and that he was more likely to have such connections due to his attendance at the TAFE.
He scoffed at this. All the TAFE students were too fixed to the straight and narrow. Besides, they were all business students. I asked Rob what he studied, and he said business.
Slumped in the lounge with the bottle between his legs, Rob said it was very painful having a person fall out of love with you. Every day when he woke up, it was only a matter of seconds before he remembered that he was in immense pain. The immense pain did not subside until he passed out that night. Before, he could never have imagined what it would be like to feel so much pain. He had not thought it feasible that this amount of pain could affect one person at any given time. It was simply intolerable. Why did people continue living when this much pain was possible?
Rob said he believed that Ciara was going out with another man. He’d been trying to call her all the time on her parents’ number, just to ask why she broke up with him. Whenever she deigned to answer — which she didn’t, most of the time — he would simply ask questions like: why did you break up with me. What did I do wrong. How can I fix it.
Rob would claim to her that he had never been as much in love with someone his whole life. He’d warn that it was impossible for her to find someone who loved her as much as he. She would respond that this was possibly true, but she didn’t deserve such love, and anyhow, she was going through many emotional issues, most of which he could never begin to understand. He’d reply that he wanted to understand them and help her work through them, but this response did not satisfy her.
And yet, she had never strictly said she didn’t still love him. Sometimes he would ask if she was still in love with him, but she wouldn’t respond. She would stay perfectly silent. So then he would say to her: why would you want to be apart from me if you still love me? Because he figured she clearly did love him, given her reluctance to say otherwise. Ciara would become frustrated and say she needed to get off the phone for a totally unbelievable reason.
When Rob lied and said that he knew for certain that she was in love with someone else, she became nasty. She would no longer claim that Rob was too good for her. Instead, she would lash out, tell Rob that it was none of his business whether she was or she wasn’t, but that she wasn’t, and that he needed to accept that.
She told him she was not in love with someone else, but even if this was true, Rob thought she was insinuating that it was possible she would one day. And this was the most painful fact of the whole scenario for him. She would be a girlfriend to someone else one day, and she might even talk about Rob disdainfully, like he was a pathetic man who couldn’t accept being abandoned, wouldn’t leave her alone, and would never have a girlfriend half as good as she had been.
So Rob changed tack: instead of continually calling her to ask why she broke up with him, or whether she was still in love with him, he started to ask — whenever he could get her to answer the phone — whether it was true that she had a new boyfriend. He would try to trick her into thinking that he already knew about her supposed new boyfriend, even though he didn’t know anything. He would say, “I know you have a boyfriend” to which she would reply, “I don’t, and anyway it’s none of your business.” And then she would hang up.
Rob knew that he had already ruined any chance of having Ciara fall back in love with him. How could she, especially when he had cried on the phone to her a lot? And yet, he knew they belonged together. He imagined scenarios of them visiting the city together, sightseeing, having a wine in a bar, meeting each other’s parents, and he knew two things to be true: that it was impossible for him to be happy unless these scenarios occurred, and equally, that they never would.
Defeated, Rob decided that he would smoke marijuana every day for the rest of his life. He wanted to degrade himself and ruin his brain until one day Ciara would see him and think it was her fault that he was now a broken man. She might decide that it hadn’t been a good idea to break up with him after all. Maybe she would try to mend his life by getting back together with him, despite her emotional problems and his erosive addiction.
It would be partially your fault too, Rob slurred at me, peeling the label from his beer bottle. He sat there mumbling for a while. I could tell that he didn’t like me, and probably never had. But I did not feel threatened by Rob, as it was clear that he had no intention of doing me any physical harm.
I sat and watched the football panel show for a while. Although he was in a foul mood, Rob occasionally smirked at the jokes, and grunted derisively at times when the announcers offered their thoughts on how the current season would likely play out. When a particular football player belonging to Rob’s preferred team was mentioned among the banter, he would repeat the name enthusiastically. Feeling as though I had been let off the hook, for the night at least, I went back to my bedroom and recommenced writing about the town.
*
In the days that followed Rob’s depressing speech, I frequently visited Ciara’s flat. Sometimes I would wait at her door for an hour or so, sitting cross-legged at the head of the stairs, waiting for her to arrive. During these periods, when I became fed up with waiting for Ciara, I boarded the bus at the stop opposite her flat. Then, once I had travelled a full circulation of Tom’s route, I would disembark at the central park and commence knocking on Ciara’s door again, before eventually going back home, where I would carefully avoid Rob.
Once when I boarded the bus, Tom was eating a Quarter Pounder and looking more forlorn than usual. As he turned the bus into a dusty street lined with many abandoned homes, he pointed his burger through the windscreen. It was his old house, or at least, he thought it was. His old house could actually have been the one next door. Tom poked his burger towards the next block. Or it could have been on the next block. It was getting harder to place. Many of the townhouses in the central district had been abandoned. He didn’t know under what circumstances, nor could he remember specifically who had lived in them. He’d noticed that more and more of the houses were decrepit through neglect.
He’d never seen a removalist, or any sign of people moving furniture from their homes to some other location. The houses seemed to have become decrepit overnight. It was like a rot spreading through the town. One morning a verandah would be freshly swept, the next it was covered with old envelopes and advertising pamphlets. Refuse would block the garden paths, and the weeds, tangled with old beer bottles and K-Mart catalogues, would have grown knee-high over the course of a night.
We turned into another street of sad townhouses. Tom told me that he still occasionally saw people entering and leaving the properties, but it was clear by the way they walked up the garden paths that they did not strictly live in these places. He said you could tell by the way people swung their arms as they approached the front doors. These people were not people who lived in the town. They were there in the town, and he supposed they existed, but it was clear they did not live in the town, especially since he had never seen their faces before.
As we crossed the border road onto one of the town’s tentacles, I asked Tom why The Stern Gentlemen had originally stopped performing, fifteen years before that Raymond person had not shown up for the one-off gig.
Tom came to a stop at the foot of the tentacle road and opened the doors, then he closed the doors, continued up the road for two hundred metres, stopped, and opened the doors again. It always took about an hour to drive just one tentacle road. Tom’s adherence to the official timetable had become lax, but I respected that he still pulled in at every official stop. The futile pace of his bus was enjoyable.
One day an out-of-towner named Greg had phoned, seeking Tom’s help putting on a show in the town. Few bands from outside the town had ever showed any interest playing in the town: if a band fro
m the country was going to bother travelling for a show they would try their luck in the city. Occasionally a band from the city might charitably play a gig outside of the city, but it would be in a much nicer and more interesting place than the town.
Following the phone call, Tom had organised a show at The Vic on an upcoming Thursday night. The line-up was to feature three local bands plus the out-of-towners. The out-of-towners had agreed that no money needed to exchange hands, because Greg had said they were doing it only to have new ears listen to their music. With the complexity of finances ruled out, Tom had seen no reason to deny helping them set up this opportunity.
When Tom had asked Greg what type of music his band played, in order to make sure he booked similar-sounding bands on the night, the out-of-towner had said the band didn’t have a sound. Tom had sympathised with Greg on this point, because few bands ever wanted to admit to having a particular sound. He had pressed Greg to describe his band anyway, at least in terms of genre, for Tom’s own benefit more than anything. Tom had asked if they were a rock band and Greg had said that yes, they were a rock band, but only to put an end to all the questions.
The show had been arranged over the course of two phone calls. Once Tom had confirmed the date and time he didn’t hear from Greg again until a month later, when the band arrived at his doorstep with all their equipment.
The band hadn’t had a name. During their first phone call, when Tom had asked Greg what the band was called, Greg had said that it didn’t have a name and that it wasn’t important to have one. Tom had to list them as someone though, so on the poster he billed the out-of-towners as The Out of Towners.
The Town Page 11
