The Town

by Shaun Prescott

  *

  The town’s train station was exactly as Jenny had described: a so-called museum inside a train station, ostensibly a tribute to a closed stop, but in actual fact a shop selling artisanal dolls, crockery and landscape paintings.

  I arrived a bit before 5pm and explained to the man at the counter that I was there to see the freight train. I lied that I intended to board it, just to see his reaction. He said I absolutely could not board the freight train, that it didn’t stop, that he didn’t know where it went, and that besides, it was a freight train.

  I bought an Anzac biscuit and found a seat on the platform. The station retained all of the qualities one expects of an historical train station: lush potted plants, quaint wooden signage, and ornate metal park chairs. At 4:59pm I could see the freight train trundling closer to the station. Then, at exactly 5pm, its engine entered the eastern side of the station before the series of rusted metal containers it pulled shuttled through, revealing nothing of their contents as they passed into the western distance.

  So there you have it, the museum operator said. He had arrived at my side without me noticing, giving off an odour of coffee and cigarette smoke. He told me that now I’d seen the freight train I could imagine what it might have been like during the time the train station operated at its full capacity. Maybe I could even imagine what it had been like to board or alight the train here, he said, in a voice intended to evoke wonder. He thought about this all the time.

  As Jenny had warned, the museum operator knew nothing of when the station was built, nor when it was officially closed. He and his wife had opened the shop many years ago with the council’s blessing, and it was possible that the station had operated during their lifetime, only how could they know the finer details when they themselves had never harboured any desire to catch a train anywhere? For details on the history of the train station, the museum operator advised that I try asking the elderly people of the town, though he doubted I’d find an answer for such an obscure question.

  The freight train’s destination was also obscure information, according to the museum operator. He did not mention the man who had once jumped onto the train, possibly to avoid spreading bad publicity about his business.

  Oh the train goes somewhere, he said, returning to his evocative tone. It no doubt transports produce from the city to the country. I suggested to the museum operator that normally produce would also travel from the country to the city, and that perhaps the freight train travelled back towards the city in a round trip. The museum operator denied it. The freight train only travels from east to west, he said. That means somewhere west there is a town or station with a field of terminated freight trains, I speculated aloud. It’s possible that there are many acres, hundreds of square kilometres even, of terminated freight trains with nowhere to go. The museum operator agreed that this was probably true, but claimed it wasn’t his job to oversee the state’s infrastructure, it being a task more complicated than he or I could possibly imagine. He walked away.

  When the museum operator left the platform I climbed onto the tracks and walked in a westerly direction. After five hundred metres the track curved away from the station, winding its way between the back fences of residential houses, before running straight for a kilometre in what I took to be a south-westerly direction. The grass on the track side of the sagging neighbourhood fences was thick with trash and Paterson’s Curse. The houses looked sad and decrepit from this vantage point, but I could not have been in the poor area of the town: the gasworks façade was nowhere in sight, and besides, the poor area was east of the train station.

  My disorientation really started in earnest when the train line I was walking on passed beneath a bridge I had never seen before. A certain vantage point to the left of the track revealed signage for a tyre warehouse on the street above — Mick’s Motors and Tyre Warehouse — which was presumably part of a small industrial neighbourhood I had never encountered before. Neither my frequent exploratory walks in the town, nor the bus’s exhaustive route, had ever taken me there.

  Past the bridge, the lines of residential homes were replaced by the looming cement backs of two- and three-storey buildings, visibly aged and grey. It was impossible to discern the finer details of the town’s layout from there, but I was certain I had never seen the front of those tall buildings – nor any other tall building for that matter. A crest of land started to emerge at both sides, gradually ascending until I was walled in by old rocks. The sky seemed much further away now, more remote, in that tunnel-like valley. I had never felt so tightly pressed in by the town.

  Though afternoon was fading I did not feel compelled to turn around. I began to suspect I had entered another town altogether, or else a secret district inaccessible by road or footpath. It was true that the town’s grinding mood of over-familiarity had lifted – though I only recognised the mood in retrospect, once it had gone. Wandering the enclosed train track, I felt like an explorer treading beyond some impenetrable threshold for the first time.

  After a while the tall cement buildings were behind me, but the track remained sunken in the earth. The rocky crests at either side were too steep and unstable to climb. Traffic sounds had diminished; cicadas droned in their place. Far ahead, the crests gradually fell away into a bleak, dark-green countryside. When I finally emerged, the track continued in a straight line to the horizon, through half-a-dozen paddocks and over a hill. No other features were in view except the silhouettes of distant trees, and the early evening shimmer of a muddy dam. It was impossible to tell how far the hill on the horizon was in the dusk, but there was no need to investigate – it was obvious the track’s destination was too far away. The earth in those fields radiated loneliness.

  Yet I felt compelled to follow the track anyway. I had nothing to lose, and it had been a long time since I had seen an uninterrupted expanse of land, let alone walked across one. The sun had fused pleasantly with the distant hills, suffusing the dark blue with an orange glow. Ignoring the track, it was possible to imagine that no one else had set foot on these plains before. There was no evidence of country homes or improvised dirt – no farming, no campfires, no disappearing towns. I walked for nearly half-an-hour before it dawned on me that the sun had made no progress in its decline: it sat permanently at the cusp of the horizon, and the track was as faintly illuminated as it had been when I exited the makeshift railway valley.

  Meanwhile, the sky behind me — the sky above where the town must have been — was not illuminated at all. There was no light pollution, no distant ambience and no gasworks tower. Either the town had disappeared, or I had.

  At that remove the town existed only as a memory, and not a very vivid one. I was unable to remember the specific layout of its streets with any clarity. Only certain building façades came to mind, completely at random, and when I thought about Ciara I couldn’t picture her. She was a name and a series of barely connected facts, and none of these cohered. It was difficult to stay rational under the potent impression that I had never been in the town at all. My memories were like those of locations in books – locations born of the imagination’s impulse rather than any painstaking description on the author’s part. Though stars festooned the sky thicker than in the town, and though the moon was close to full, the surface of the land I trod was sunken in darkness, and I needed to step carefully.

  At that moment it seemed impressive that the town existed at all. In a world of famous landmarks and major cities, of globally-felt phenomena and apocalyptic prognostications, it was a miracle the town was there, even if it was now invisible to my eyes.

  I was walking across the type of land often described as ‘wild’ and ‘indifferent’. Close though I was to a well-established town, my instinct was to believe that the land was not to be known. It was the slate on which a certain variety of logic and meaning could be drawn, and it seemed inevitable that some day, someone would. But this land was not as wild and indifferent as I had come to expect. It was at the edge of a town,
after all, and just over the nearest hill there might have been the highway, raging with its own indifference through the lay of the land. The town was wild and indifferent, I was wild and indifferent, but it seemed during that suspended moment at the edge of the town that the land was anything but. From the town, it was impossible to see the land stretch this luxuriously. The town shunned it, repurposed it, shielded it with terminated developments, distant edgeland warehouses, and the waste that accumulated at the side of the never-ending westerly highway.

  For the likes of me it was only possible to either be in the town, or at the edge of it, or very far away – somewhere specifically else. At the crest of the distant hill the remains of the sun illuminated what appeared at first to be nothing at all. When my eyes adjusted, I realised I was standing on the last hill. The only horizon left was the one that lead to more identical horizons, and I supposed the desert was out there, maybe hundreds of kilometres away.

  To the far east of this view lay the unmistakable silhouette of the town’s gasworks, and then the glitter of the lighted town surrounding it. I did not question the logic of the train track I had walked along. There was no use thinking about the lost freight trains. The gasworks and the town lights beckoned me on the horizon.

  When I got back to town I told Jenny what I had found. She shook her head, said it was harsh and dangerous out there. God knows how the likes of her lived at the edge of this harshness and danger, but she did, they all did, and she supposed that was what made them of the town.

  I told Jenny that the town should not be thought of as brave simply by dint of sitting where it does. It was arrogant to consider the land outside the town as wild and indifferent. If this is the land we all claim to belong to, then surely a more charitable view was owed. She only laughed when I said this. She didn’t belong to the land at all, she said. Some of it was hers, she owned a piece of it, but she did not belong. It seemed more than ever that she believed herself a frontierswoman, one braving a ruthless soil. In fact all she did was live in a building, buffered by other buildings, buffered by the barriers the town had either inadvertently or deliberately put in place.

  The land outside the town was beautiful, she said, but it was an ugly beautiful. The misty green fields in England, she said – now that is beautiful. The beaches in Bali, that’s beautiful. The land outside of the town there is a dry wreck — and she gestured towards out there — but it’s an ugly beautiful. It was like the people of the town, really.

  It wasn’t like us at all, I thought, though I dared not press the point with Jenny. There was nobility in ugliness. The town, by comparison, was a dreary simulacrum of somewhere else, somewhere not belonging to here.

  *

  If Ciara’s predictions are correct then the end of everything is looming as I write, many months after we parted ways. Ciara’s apocalypse is closer now than it was back then. I’ve reason to believe that she is right, as do many others. Evidence is emerging. The newspapers and pundits cannot escape it anymore.

  But for some the end of everything is daily. I know who was displaced, that they experienced their own terminal crisis not too long ago. Some live in the aftermath. Now I know that I shouldn’t have tried to write any book. I know that the books that are worth writing already exist somewhere, buried in the most inaccessible chambers of labyrinthine state libraries. No book is mine to write. At least, none that describe this.

  *

  During the weeks before I lost all hope of writing a book about the town, I laboured to find its essence. It’s true that I had never properly understood what an essence might be, nor was I certain that a town should always have one.

  For a time I would ask the people I had met, with deliberate bluntness, what the essence of the town was. Jenny at the pub said the town’s essence was being a town. Ciara said the town’s essence was not a characteristic she was qualified to define. Tom had already said the essence of the town was that nothing was complete. That there was always a fraction missing. That maybe the fraction missing was the essence.

  The streets were changing. The central park of the town was grown over, wrappers tangled the lawn; you didn’t enter for fear of snakes and well-disguised holes. The shops on the main street operated on strange schedules. It was like a giant hand had lifted and shaken the town, scattering its logic, severing all of its threads. For days the linen boutique would be shuttered but then, on a muggy evening towards midnight, the door would be open and the counter manned – but only by a shadow. There was a new essence in this — and I hoped at the time to arrive at it one day — but it was too late to diagnose the essence that was gone. Maybe there was never an essence, and this was the town’s punishment for having never established one.

  I walked aimlessly in search of the former essence, supposing a perfect angle on a specific setting might illuminate it. I supposed the essence might be in the language of the townspeople: not what they said, but the way they said it. It’s true there was an attitude and a certain way of holding one’s body in the town, but I didn’t know what they believed, or why, nor the origin of these. I only had my suspicions.

  My book was following the same trajectory as the librarian’s. It didn’t seem possible to write about the disappearing town, nor towns already disappeared, because there was nothing true to observe in them. The town is a patchwork of strange fictions, I told the librarian, though it wouldn’t be entirely true to make that observation either. Who would understand it? I suppose few would care to verify it, and even fewer would read it in the first place. I had forgotten why I wanted to write the book. What had I been searching for?

  That’s brave of you to admit, the librarian told me, seated during his lunch break at the Michel’s Patisserie opposite the Big W.

  After becoming a failed writer of books, the librarian had aspired to be an exceptionally good person instead. Seated one day in the park in the centre of town, eating his packed lunch, he had brainstormed how he would do so. He had lost all hope of revealing the depth of his character in book form, so he would need to demonstrate it in some other way.

  No available options had satisfied: he had not wanted to and nor was he able to make an extraordinary donation to any charity, and he had not wanted to help the elderly cross roads, or house stray dogs. Strategies like these promised neither elation nor pleasure, and he had wanted his goodness to be widely acknowledged, because, he had thought, there was no evidence that the town being good automatically made him good. He told me that this is what everyone else believed: that they are each and all good because the town is good – or, at least, they believe that they are not bad. Those who actually are bad, he said, are said to be possessed by some force atypical of the town, possessed by some foreign contagion, perhaps.

  The librarian had believed that in order to assert himself publicly as someone good, he needed to do so under circumstances that were not just a matter of rote benevolence. It had to be sudden, and seemingly born of some brilliant instinct. He had decided that he needed to save someone’s life.

  The librarian had never devised a plan for how this would happen. Instead he had just wandered the streets after his shifts, on the lookout for any seemingly dangerous turn of events. He’d visited pubs with the hope of intervening in brawls, and he’d lingered in the central park at night in order to interrupt any muggings. Occasionally he’d sit for a minute or two near the busiest intersection in town, on the slight chance that someone would crash their car. No one ever did – or at least, they never did while he’d been there.

  His plan had never worked. Now, he told me, he still had no idea what qualities those people most respected in the town possessed that he didn’t. They’re all successful businesspeople, he supposed, but he could never run a business, for he was bad at maths, bad at talking to people, and bad at accepting that he was not a writer of books. He was, it seemed, bad at everything — especially bad at being a part of the town — so there was little point in asking him, he said, about the town’s so-called essenc
e.

  The librarian checked his watch. It was time for him to go back to work, where he would sort and file books written by other people. I told the librarian that it might not be long before everything in the town changed dramatically. The holes were spreading quickly, doubling overnight, and it would come as no surprise if they started appearing inside of people too. This possibility of holes appearing inside of people had never occurred to me until I said it. Now I wondered if the holes had been appearing inside of people for years. What if the librarian had a hole inside him? What if I did?

  The town won’t disappear, the librarian told me. But he said that if it did, it would allow him to create something more accurate in its place. He would write with meticulous detail about this new beginning, so that in the distant future people could trace the trajectory of the town from beginning to end. In a whole new town the librarian might even have a say in establishing what the town was about from the start. He could make sure there were never any factual errors. The old people of the town — and he waved at the current town — would have no say. They had forgotten what this town was about, selectively, and he’d never forgive them for doing so. In his history, the elderly would be prehistoric, inscrutable, so far removed from the truth of his new town that no one could possibly grasp the extent to which they had lived. From that distance, he said, history might suppose that they had never lived at all.