The passage under the bridge led to a narrow open-air tunnel, and then finally to the mouth of a stormwater drain. Ciara did not walk purposefully but I knew she was leading me somewhere significant.
We walked into the mouth of the tunnel and stuck to the left side of the concrete passage. Light gradually receded until it was pitch black. We continued for several minutes, using only sound to guide us, before Ciara stopped, grabbed my hand, and pulled me down a small, barely perceptible passage. We needed to edge forward at an angle down this passage; if it had rained we would have drowned. After a while the passage opened up into a space I could sense was much bigger, and Ciara lit a lantern that she must’ve known was there.
We were in a large room, apparently chiselled out by hand. Stacks of water-damaged cassette tapes lined each of the four walls all the way to the ceiling, and more piles of tapes were sat throughout the centre of the room. Sodden bill posters covered the ground, all handmade by Ciara, and I could tell at a glance that many depicted her featureless plain. Even when a portion of poster revealed only a straight line, I knew it was a plain. This is the only secret in the town, Ciara said.
I tried to look impressed by Ciara’s secret room. I was impressed, but it was difficult to look any certain way when I was also doing it for Ciara’s benefit.
She had been trying to entice people there for years. At first she had left subtle breadcrumb trails — empty beer bottles leading to the mouth of the tunnel, and texta hieroglyphs on the walls just inside the mouth — but still no one had ever broke the fragile string she’d tied across the entrance to the room. No one in the town had ever thought to explore the stormwater drains, and she supposed there was no good reason to.
Then she’d started writing articles in her magazine about a secret room somewhere beneath the town. She’d placed great emphasis on how incredible it was that there was a secret room somewhere beneath the town. It needed to be seen to be believed, she’d written – it was the only part of the town left to be discovered. She’d tried to depict the secret room beneath the town as a satisfying destination that also contained many other secrets. She knew that if she had found herself reading about a secret room under the town somewhere, the first thing she would do was try to verify that it was truthfully there, even if she suspected it was a lie. And if it turned out that she was indeed being lied to, the fact of the rumour existing would have been its own reward.
But no one had ever tripped her string. It came as no surprise really: her magazine was only printed with a photocopier and she wasn’t sure anyone ever read it. There were millions of officially-printed books more reliably interesting than her amateur magazine, she said — though none of those books were about the town. She had thought for a while that her magazine’s focus on phenomena specific to the town would encourage people to read it, but she’d been wrong. No one wanted to learn new things about the town. No one wanted to learn old things, either. She supposed people really did only want to read about why the town was great now, or why it wasn’t as great as it used to be.
We were silent for a while. I wanted to draw parallels between my book and Ciara’s efforts to lead people to the secret room, but I could not formulate sentences in a way that would suggest camaraderie. Instead, I resorted to advice. Perhaps you should make a magazine about the holes, I told her. Maybe you could write an exposé on the origin of the holes. You can make it up: if it’s printed on paper and the only source of information then maybe you will end up driving the whole agenda, since no one else was. Maybe you could claim that the secret room had in fact been chiselled out by a hole. Maybe you could claim that the tapes containing the mysterious keyboard music had been fished from the holes. Whatever the case, it could do no harm to alert people to the strangeness of the holes.
Ciara was not comforted. She lit a cigarette and we stood in silence. It was impossible to know what to do. Soon she kicked at one of the walls of cassettes, and grabbed more cassettes and tossed them aside, continuing to kick and grab and toss until a clearway had formed where there had once been a wall of tapes. The room extended in that direction much farther than I had realised, and it was jam-packed with cassette tapes.
I helped Ciara dig a tunnel through the cassettes. Our tunnel burrowed deep beneath the town, under homes and streets, curving slightly at times. We dug without speaking, our entry point plugged with plastic and unspooled tape. It was like we were digging our own cocoon. Cassettes crunched beneath our labour, echoing so loudly that the tunnel might have lead beyond the town’s shimmer. Maybe it would end at a cliff by the ocean. Maybe in a cliffside hole near the coastal city, people tossed all their cassette tapes in, unaware of the hole’s extent, believing their waste forever discarded. Maybe it didn’t matter where the tapes came from: the fact of them existing was enough, like a coastline leveed with message bottles, lids screwed too tightly.
We reached a cavern on the other side of the tapes, where a ladder on the far wall lead upwards to a trapdoor. Ciara mounted the ladder, pushed through the heavy wooden panel, then held it open for me to follow. My legs and arms were tangled in shiny brown cassette ribbon, and so were hers.
We were in a shed, the walls lined with rakes, brooms, and paint cans. As I ripped the ribbons from my limbs Ciara opened the shed door, and night air dispersed the musty smell. We were in the shed behind her flat.
*
Though I had not seen Rob for many weeks I eventually thought it wise to move out of the townhouse. After an afternoon spent inspecting the abandoned houses Tom had pointed out, I opted for the least vandalised one, situated on a street leading to the central park, opposite a BP petrol station. There were four bedrooms, each branching from a wide, high-ceiling hallway at the front of the house. Beyond the hall a cavernous lounge room lead to a kitchen, laundry and bathroom. I swept the wooden floorboards and dusted the cobwebs, but there was little I could do about the graffiti left by teenagers and local drug addicts. There was no electricity, so I used a pen and paper to continue writing my book.
Ciara was impressed that I had found such a nice home – maybe even a little bit jealous. She said she might as well store cassette tapes in the house and I agreed that she could. The next day she lugged half-a-dozen bin bags through the central park, then emptied them in a pile under the master bedroom window. She offered to arrange electricity for the house via her apprentice friend, but I was not brave enough to break the law to that extent.
I browsed the newspaper for legitimate places to rent, but none were available. Demand could not have been high in the town, and yet there was no longer any supply. After a matter of weeks I became accustomed to my circumstances. I showered in the staff bathroom before my shift at the Woolworths, and dug a hole in the large overgrown backyard for my waste. After a month, I could no longer see any point paying rent in the town.
One day Ciara helped me drag a mattress to my house. We dropped it in the master bedroom near her piles of cassettes, adjacent to the open fireplace. I made a desk with cement bricks and a piece of chipboard I found in the back shed, and bought a cheap camping chair from Kmart. Once I purchased the camping chair it was official that I would live in the abandoned townhouse for the foreseeable future. I didn’t need a candle or anything because at night the lights from the petrol station flooded the room with a harsh, surgical white.
Ciara suggested that some day maybe we could connect my house to the storm drains, via a tunnel. Maybe then we wouldn’t need to walk above ground at all – we’d just connect the tunnels to wherever we needed to go.
She was happy that I was no longer living with Rob, but she was also happy that there was someone else squatting abandoned dwellings in the town, following her example. Most nights we would drink longnecks in my overgrown backyard or on her balcony. We would share hot chips and sometimes even some fried chicken or a hamburger if we were especially hungry. Ciara would talk to me about her world predictions, and I would try to bring the topic around to the subject of my book. It was easy t
o seize upon these most pertinent subjects in a town so silent. On Thursday, Friday and Saturday night there was occasionally the sound of drunk people arguing on the footpaths, but otherwise the town slept silently as soon as the sun went down.
It seemed that we felt the same way about most things, though I never dared to think on the scale that Ciara did. It never occurred to me to worry about her. Her outlook was bleak, but she did not seem depressed, nor was she eager to do anything that might lead to change. She knew she wasn’t in control. She was born too late to make any meaningful difference. It was all already decided for us, she always said, and when I asked who exactly made the decisions and what the decisions were, she pointed to the town, and then told me I should listen to more of the cassette tapes. The mood of the world is in this music, she said. People don’t listen to it because no one wants to be a Town Extremist: listening to cassette tapes, found beneath the soap dispensers in the women’s bathroom at the plaza, or buried in the sugar satchels at the McDonald’s, was not of the town enough. It was a huge risk. Who knew what kind of horror might be contained on a tape?
Ciara said that if I listened to the music closely, I would hear a reflection of the world outside. Then she waved in the direction of the mess of brambles and discarded corrugated iron at the far end of my backyard. Ciara had listened to so much of the strange keyboard music that she could recognise popular melodies in the decayed sections. It was like eavesdropping on the world from a vast distance, or like hearing the poorly recollected memories of a once vibrant, hopeful world. She said that when the prospect of finding the creators of the strange keyboard music seemed even more remote than usual, she liked to imagine it was the music of aliens witnessing us from afar, offering their sympathetic elegies.
After three weeks living in the derelict house I wandered past Rob’s one day. The grass was overgrown but the grass had always been overgrown – though it was now strewn with tell-tale pamphlets and bill notices, and the curtains had been removed revealing empty rooms within. Peering through the windows, I could see no evidence of a sudden move. The layout of the house — the way the open doors lead into the darkness of the narrow halls — seemed different to the house I had once in-habited. The townhouse had become mysteriously vacated, just as Tom had described. I suppose it was lucky that I left when I did, though maybe I had passed up an important opportunity to go wherever those people went next.
*
One afternoon before my shift at the Woolworths I retrieved Rick from the cereal aisle and offered to buy him a coffee. Since our initial talk he had always nodded hello as I packed canned foods, but he never dared stop for fear of affecting my shelfing targets. I won’t interrupt the workers in the supermarket, Rick would always say. It’s disrespectful to the supermarket.
I had never cared to study Rick’s face closely, but when I did over coffee it occurred to me that he no longer really lived in the town. Yes, he was there, and presumably his home was too, but he had breached the shimmer long ago. It was no epiphany that had set in motion his extrication: the town itself had squeezed him out. What remained was only a body.
For a while I’d presumed Rick would have a big part to play in my book about the disappearing town. Without thinking about the ramifications, I’d long believed the story would resolve itself in this direction. When I flicked through its pages in my imagination, Rick’s name appeared regularly. But in practice, I was not having any luck including him, or a version of him, in my book about the town. There was something too conclusive about Rick at the supermarket. I feared he might prove something I did not want to prove.
Rick told me over our coffees that some of the happiest days of his life were spent loitering in this Michel’s Patisserie, including when he had been a teenager. He and his friends had often waited here, in order to pounce on any passing eighteen-year-old who might agree to buy beer for them. Once someone had agreed, they had always met this buyer in the underground car park to transact the goods. Then Rick and his friends would get drunk in private at the weekend, behind the grandstands at the football ground.
Visiting the plaza after school, it had been impossible not to find people to hang around with. It had been just as impossible to not be involved in some controversy, and it’d been enjoyable to witness the controversies play out. It had been especially fun to be at the heart of the controversies, said Rick. These had commonly involved a love interest, and the question of whether that love interest loved you, or loved someone else. Ultimately everyone had always loved someone; every moment had been suffused with import. It had been a time of major heartbreaks, but also of talking to girls and maybe even having sex with them, but in reality, never having sex with them at all.
Sometimes Rick and his friends had sat in the food court eating chips and gravy. They had talked endlessly, and everything had been interesting. He told me that each person had always hoped the conversation would land on a topic of special interest to them – for example, whether or not a love interest was potentially reciprocal or not.
Now that he mentioned all this to me, Rick admitted that finding a lover was the motivation for everything he and his friends did. That’s all anything had ever been about, though getting drunk at the weekend had been a close second priority. Every Friday and Saturday night Rick and his friends would get extremely drunk behind the grandstand at the football ground. At the plaza they had made their plans, both vocally and secretly, but the football ground was where the plans had been executed.
It had been an uncomplicated joy for Rick, getting drunk as a teenager. Everyone had become more receptive, more sentimental and warm. Monday and Tuesday was for studying each hilariously drunken moment from the weekend, as well as every sign of possible blossoming love. Then Wednesday and Thursday was for planning and anticipating the upcoming weekend: arranging alcohol and cigarettes, and determining who would be attending the grandstand gatherings.
Life had felt like an episodic drama, a drama that could not end bleakly, because it had been impossible to imagine life becoming bleak at all. There had been difficulties of course, but Rick had thought back then that no one was deserving of agony. That no one was deserving of misery. That eventually they would all leave school, get jobs and get married, just as their parents had done with ease, and they’d all still get drunk but in pubs instead of parks. Nothing could go wrong with these plans, because that’s what everyone seemingly did before them, and if everyone did it then it couldn’t be difficult.
Life had turned out to be very difficult for Rick, he told me. He didn’t know why, but it had. He had marched up to the transformative threshold but was denied passage. When everyone else had begun working at their menial jobs, which would grow to be managerial jobs, and maybe then something even more important and lucrative, he had still been wandering the plaza, looking for a way in. Even when his job prospects had seemed the most hopeless, towards the end of Ruth and Giselle’s lives, he had still wandered the plaza, CV in hand, hoping to encounter one of his high school friends. But on the rare occasions he had, they had been performing some or other duty related to their job, and could barely stop to say hello.
There had been nothing left to talk about anyway, Rick said, since he’d gotten married.
I was taking notes as Rick described his torment. I did not feel intrusive or voyeuristic, because he spoke in a cheerfully fateful tone of voice, as if he were surveying his life from a vast, impersonal distance.
He said it was now impossible to enter the plaza without remembering those warm years, and yet, he did not feel compelled to contrast them with his current situation. Maybe if he had left the town and returned, the plaza would be sad. But he’d never left, never stopped going to the plaza; the best way to ward off sadness, he believed, was to make any environment permanently commonplace, to bury the place in daily logistics. In this way, he could keep layering on new meanings. It wasn’t a foolproof enterprise, but it was true that he now felt ambivalence rather than nostalgia whenever he passed t
hrough the plaza. It’s hard to feel sentimental about a place that had never become unfamiliar.
The best way to plug memories is to distort them with the present, Rick told me, in the same way that it’s possible to erase meaning from a song by repeatedly listening to it. For example, if Rick bought a pull-apart cheese roll at the Bakers Delight every single day for the rest of his life, then he was increasingly likely to forget the time he had bought a jam tart for a girl he had adored. The Bakers Delight would lose its significance. In the same way, if he visited the football grandstand every Friday and Saturday night now as an adult, and found it empty of drinking teenagers, surely he would eventually forget that once it was bustling with them. In this way, slowly, Rick had been asserting himself against his fondest memories, dimming the contrast between now and then. He was continually reconfiguring the town. Repurposing it.
The most resistant location to his method was his home. He had spent his entire teenagehood longing for the day he’d leave home, and yet there he still was, still waking every day in that same bedroom, his mother in the next room, the spectre of his father omnipresent. It was impossible not to seek perspective in that environment, impossible not to trace the causes of circumstances. He had always been conscious that he should have moved on to more. And so he would leave the house, every day, all day, and come to the supermarket.
The Town Page 13
