But he told me he’d never given a new town any close thought, since the current town definitely wasn’t going to disappear. And he shrugged his shoulders and left the Michel’s Patisserie without saying goodbye.
*
The next morning, three blocks of the main street had disappeared. The absence was so large that it was no longer just depthless or devoid of colour. Instead, it had become a glimmering mirror, towering skyward, as high and wide as the missing buildings. Viewed from any direction, the mirror — it could no longer be called a hole — reflected the land in those directions. At least, it appeared to do so. No one dared prove it. People saw with their own eyes, amid the softly drawn world inside, a reflection of a region in which they no longer lived.
Early risers pottered the streets at its edge, staring into the reflection of the vacated landscape in which they stood. This disappearance could not be contained with chipboard or any other material. Someone called the police, and they came, but they only joined the witnesses. By nine o’clock, hundreds were spectating from adjoining roads, careful not to stand on the yellow-taped pieces of chipboard that had long consumed the footpaths.
I heard someone ask out loud: what could have caused it? Many people were saying similar things, at first mildly and remotely, and then, as the hours passed, with an impatient tinge. None had answers, but the most common belief was that it was an environmental disaster. By midday that theory was widely believed to be true, and there was an atmosphere of relief, as now someone powerful would no doubt come to their aid. Someone in the town had surely appealed for help. Probably the police had already done so, or the mayor, or a town busybody.
The site came to resemble an impromptu carnival. People gathered on the fourth remaining block of the main street, near the air-conditioned entrances to the two shopping plazas, eating from bags of chips and even drinking beer as they gazed at the mirror. Policemen put up police tape along the edge, lending spectators the courage to wander closer. It was a mirror, but not one that reflected perfectly. Some things in the reflection were missing. None of the witnesses saw themselves. If there was any concern for who might already have been lost inside, I heard none express it. The shops had long closed anyway, and the strip rendered useless, were it not an avenue for cars that, despite the seeming danger, still drove in wide detours around the phenomenon.
Ciara’s flat was located in one of the disappeared blocks. But I soon found her among the spectators.
I found her, hand on hip outside the Rivers clothing store, eating a cheesy bread roll from the Bakers Delight discards. She said she’d fallen to sleep in her secret room, and then when she’d tried to climb up into the shed, she’d peered up into the chamber and it was an infinite ladder. It had climbed towards a ceiling in an impossibly large room.
I had emerged from my abandoned home that morning to my normal view of the petrol station across the road. But the bowser boys were not in sight, and no cars lined the lanes. The air was different. When I turned into town on my way to Ciara’s flat there was no road and no park. Instead there was the towering hill of reflection, and I thought at first it was a trick of the light. But approaching the emptiness of the browned spectral fields within, no buildings or roads emerged.
Ciara had followed her tunnel back to the stormwater drain entrance. From there, she had edged through the holes, between infested houses and vacant lots, until she arrived at the highway. She waved towards the highway. Business was carrying on as usual there. The cars were driving through like normal, to the city or the country, and the petrol stations there were as busy as they always were. She thought at first that it was an early morning hallucination, except she could detect a strange shade clouding the town centre – and she waved at the sky. Then, when she had marched up the main street to fetch me, her way was blocked by the disappearance.
By early afternoon the people in the town seemed happier, because they were still alive. It was agreed that death by the mirror-hole was unlikely, and it had also been agreed that the problem was now big enough to warrant calling for a government representative to help, or maybe even the military. Such officials would ensure that whatever had been lost would be found, and whatever destroyed fixed. In the meantime it was sensible to make the most of this phenomenon while it lasted. Everyone wanted to be a part of this event because it would surely go down in history. It was something in the town, finally, which would.
There were fights, of course – a natural consequence of having many people in one place in the town. Long lines emerged from the Domino’s pizza shop, and the Subway, and a smaller line from the Red Rooster. The main street was legally an alcohol-free zone, but the circumstances prevented the police addressing such minor concerns. Instead they just stood cheerfully at the makeshift barricades to the mirror, posing for photos and exchanging banter with small children.
The festive mood turned volatile when someone penetrated the mirror. A young boy, shorter than the police tape barricade, only five or six or so, wearing shorts, a blue football jumper, sand shoes, and with cropped blond hair, sprinted through the morass and disappeared inside. Loud yells of reaction were followed by the howling of his mother, eerily late to arrive. She made to follow him, but a policeman held her back. Men and women scampered along the edge of the police lines, pretending to be eager to follow the boy in. Bottles and other useless objects were lobbed into the mirror, disappearing instantly. Sensing they were losing control, the police appealed for calm, for quiet, and even experimented with the mirror, dipping in their arms and prodding their feet at its edge, failing to mask their dread as the tips of their limbs momentarily vanished.
Ciara and I stood alone a distance away, at the entry to the clothing store. Everyone else pressed closer to the giant mirror-hole, making unreasonable demands of it and each other, and struggling to compete with the mother. She knocked two policemen over and bull-rushed the mirror, prompting five others to barge after her in pursuit. They all disappeared. Many people were whipped up by their momentum, and followed them.
From our vantage point this entire moment did not seem to be real. Our viewpoint wasn’t perfect enough to lend the stampede the sense of gravity it deserved, and the scene wasn’t glazed in the manner of a television broadcast, nor was it commentated. Dozens of people, maybe a full hundred, seeped into the mirror, and it didn’t feel like it was the most important thing we had ever seen.
Fights broke out among the remaining crowd, with inevitable results. Ciara and I climbed onto the awning of the Rivers clothing store and watched as crowds of men and women fell or were flung or simply marched straight into the phenomenon. Ciara told me she didn’t think they were dying. She thought they were just disappearing. I told her that she was probably correct, for if they were going in their hundreds to their deaths, the street would have had a more convincing sense of occasion. It would have felt like an historical moment. It didn’t. It all just seemed ridiculous.
Workers at both the Woolworths and Coles heard about the event, finally. We could see them in their near-identical uniforms filing out of the sliding glass doors and onto the footpaths, hands to brows, other hands pointing. I asked Ciara whether she had recognised any of the people vanishing into the phenomenon, and she told me that of course she did. She had recognised every single one of them. She pointed at the crowd and said that it was unlikely however that they recognised each other.
Soon the afternoon sun shone too hotly on the corrugated iron awning we were standing on, so we climbed down and went into one of the big shopping plazas. It was quiet under the fluorescent lights, except for the distant ring of cash registers and barcode scanners at the Woolworths. I bought us a longneck of beer each from the adjoining BWS, and we returned to the street.
Things outside had quietened down. People weren’t fighting or marching into the hole anymore. They were all just looking at it again, with a new, strange calm. Although, their focus had indeed shifted. There seemed to be growing resentment among them towards the cr
owd of people all the way on the other side of the void, who were gathered up near the northern-most petrol station. Perhaps what annoyed them was that there were other people involved at all, watching from an entirely different angle. Maybe the version of events from these other people would prove to be the definitive one. And it did seem that there was no way to get to these other people, for due to holes all the roads in the town were now impossible to navigate (though the wide roads circling the central district were intact), and the only other way was to pass through a fire exit in the plaza with the Coles. But no one did, because it was rumoured that using the fire exit was illegal.
Despite the resentment, or perhaps because of it, people on our side were eager to establish a mood of solidarity among themselves. They chanted the name of the town, and the odd ruffian threw bottles and other rubbish at the mirror. Some people chanted the name of the nation while throwing their trash, as if the mirror were an invading foreign power or something naturally — but not actively — hostile to the town. The number of ruffians in the crowd seemed to grow: shirtless and red-faced, drunk since the morning hours and swollen with gestures. These men, usually tamed by the rules they took for granted in the town, wanted nothing more than to thump somebody amid the new anarchy. They roamed the crowd in packs, targeting the few who did not look perfectly of the town. They had a special instinct for strangers, and before too long four men marched up to the closed Pizza Haven in front of which Ciara and I were standing.
Ciara whispered into my ear that this was Steve Sanders.
I drank deeply from my longneck, and asked which one.
All of them, she said.
My instinct was to flee, and so I did. I ran into the plaza and down the hall that culminated in the fire exit to the other side of the giant mirror-hole, but someone had locked the door. The four Steve Sanderses followed, moving with excruciating calm as they neared me. One of them asked what I was running for. The others laughed. I mentioned my complete innocence, sounding very harmless and pathetic, but in that moment I didn’t sound innocent, even to myself.
We just wanted to say hello, one Steve said. You never say hello. Why don’t you ever say hello?
I told him I was too shy, and that I had heard rumours that Steve Sanders wanted to bash me.
Each Steve moaned in mock sympathy. One told me that they wanted to bash me because I never said hello. Another said that in this town everyone says hello.
I told them that I didn’t know that.
Well it’s true, one said. You’re writing a book about the town but you don’t even say hello.
My book isn’t about this town, I told them.
They didn’t seem to believe me. Why would you write a book about our town, a Steve Sanders said. There’s nothing to say about it.
I agreed that there was no reason to write a book about the town, that there was nothing to say about their town.
So our town isn’t worth your time, then, another Steve Sanders said. What’s a better town to write about?
There is no better frigging town, another said, the rancid smell of beer on his mouth. What’s your problem with this town?
It’s not good enough for him, another said.
What a cunt, another added.
You come to our town, take our jobs, and you don’t even respect it as the best town in Australia, a Steve Sanders said. Do you see us coming to your town, writing books about it, talking down about it?
Another told me to think carefully before I answered. But I didn’t think it wise to make them wait for a considered answer. I told them no, because I didn’t have a town of my own.
Bullshit, one said
I saw Ciara behind them, standing at the entry to the hall, signalling at me. She was pointing to her mouth and shaking her head, and making gestures with her fist.
The thinnest Sanders stepped forward, making me flinch. You realise no one in this town likes you? he said. Everyone thinks you’re a piece of crap. Why do you stay?
I protested, told them that I actually adored the town. That it was so peaceful and idyllic, that I did not feel good enough for it, hence my lack of saying hello. This prompted Ciara to make her gestures more urgent.
You’re taking the piss, one said.
You’re only saying that, another said, feigning hurt.
No book exists to just describe how great a town is, the most articulate Sanders said. Books about towns always describe how bad they are, how bad things have happened in them. But what has happened that is so bad in this town? Nothing, because there is no book about it.
We don’t have a book, the last Sanders said, and we’d like to keep it that way. He told me that there is no reason to have a book. That if I did write a book, they hoped it’d be about how they punched my lights out. Then they made to attack me, but didn’t, like bluffing footballers who don’t throw punches because they don’t want to get in trouble.
I told them my book wasn’t about hidden bad things, but rather the current condition of the town. I told them, warming to the subject of my book, that no one really understands why towns in the Central West of New South Wales are the way they are now. No one has captured their essence in an historical book, nor even a fictional one. Wouldn’t it be good for people to understand how excellent things are? Why should you be denied a reason to be here, I told them, thinking myself at that moment to be a cunning manipulator. My book wasn’t refuting any history, nor attempting to create one. It was simply an acknowledgment, lest the town disappear. Which it is, I said, pointing towards the giant mirror-hole. I told the multiple Steve Sanderses that they might some day regret antagonising the sole person willing to write a book about their town, and anyway, that there were arguably more important problems at that moment than me and my book.
So you are writing a book about the town, one Steve Sanders said. So you were lying before.
I’m not writing about this town specifically, I said, but about towns in the Central West. I supposed aloud, in a manner I believed to be humble, that their town might share certain characteristics with all the towns I truthfully wanted to write about.
So you think our town is just like any other town, one Steve Sanders said.
I could not think of a correct response to this question – and by correct, I mean a response that would keep them at bay. Being similar to another town might have appealed to them, but it might have angered them too. I responded that I had no conclusion, that I was still studying the other towns, but definitely not this specific one. It made sense for me to stay in this town, given its proximity to the other disappeared or disappearing towns. I used it as a base, as an access point to my real sources.
So our town is just a base for you, one of the Steve Sanders said.
Yes, I said, exhausted. It’s a base. But a very pleasant base. A beautiful one, with its own local culture.
For us it’s a way of life, another Steve Sanders said. And nothing bad happens here anymore. Nothing happens at all here anymore. There may have been things that happened in the past, but as for now, things definitely do happen, but they’re not historical. He dared light a cigarette in the plaza, and continued: does everything that ever happens need to be made into a book? No, he said, I don’t think so. Nothing that happens now here is historical. History is in the past. He pointed to the floor and said, this is what history worked towards. This is the result of it. This is what people worked for. Farmers, builders, Anzacs, the lot. This is how things are going to be from now on. This is how they’re going to stay. History can end, you know. It doesn’t need to keep going. We now have everything set perfectly in place, and so nothing needs to happen anymore. Interesting historical things don’t always need to be happening. It’s better when they don’t.
Yeah, another of the Sanders men said, so even if you were writing a book about the town, it wouldn’t be very interesting. No one would care about your book.
Just admit you’re a fuckwit, mate, another said.
The fire alarm wen
t off, and we stood there, confused. Within a few seconds all the Coles employees arrived at the head of the hall, sweeping Ciara up in their panic. The Steve Sanders that was smoking stubbed out his cigarette, turned around, and told the Coles employee evacuees to use the main entry because the fire exit was locked. The store manager jangled a chain of many keys in a show of authority, and none of the Steve Sanderses could resist it, so they stepped aside. Amid the fuss Ciara grabbed my arm and pulled me back inside the plaza. We ran, and the Sanderses ran after us. As we turned the corner towards the sliding exit doors to the street, one crash-tackled me from behind.
You can’t run from us, a Steve Sanders barked as he pinned me to the ground. If you do, there’s always others out there ready to pounce. He punched me in the collarbone and then stood, pressing one foot against my chest. I had hoped the Steve Sanderses no longer wanted to bash me, that a simple dressing-down would suffice, but they started to kick me with increasing force. Ciara stepped outside and lit a cigarette.
Moments later she yelled to the nearby crowd outside that there was a fight. Dozens rushed to witness the spectacle: a proper brawl. I can’t recall how many people because I quickly passed out, probably from terror, more than the pain.
*
The next day when Ciara arrived at my house I was sitting in the dusty lounge room writing my book. Although I had decided my book would never be completed, there was no other way to spend the time. I also felt like not writing a book would render my whole existence pointless.
I was surprised to see her, as she had appeared to abandon me the day before. Before I could say anything, she asked what I could possibly be writing under the circumstances.
I told her that I was in the middle of a chapter I had never previously thought to include in my book. It was an important chapter, and it was requiring a whole new approach. I would need to write a second draft after all, I told Ciara, because I believed I knew why the town — her town — was disappearing before our very eyes.
The Town Page 16
