The Town

by Shaun Prescott

  It was one o’clock when we arrived in the city.

  *

  We wandered a beachside suburb. I told Ciara that the city was the oceanside. That it was many things, perhaps even everything she had imagined, but that the oceanside was the quintessential region of it. The oceanside was what you saw on the television and read about in books.

  We parked the car in an open-air lot. Outdoor showers and food stalls lined the promenade. Beachgoers sauntered in their shorts and bikinis, seemingly oblivious to the spectacle of the ocean. It seemed impossible that a person could ever lose fascination for the water. How could you not just stare?

  This is where we will set up, I told Ciara. We’ll make it our routine to drink coffee on the grassy embankment, and to gaze at the ocean during lazy morning conversations. Eventually others would tend to join us, and then we would start to feel properly in the city. And once we were employed, presumably at the Woolworths in the nearby plaza, we could rent or even buy one of the apartments facing the water. After that we would just wait and see what happened. I told her that I might even feel inclined to write a book about something. I had not read any of the hundreds of books about the coastal city, but I knew what they were about.

  We didn’t have swimmers, so we took off our shoes and tiptoed to the shore in our bare feet. There was a shimmer on the water many kilometres out, resembling the edge of the town when inside looking out. This shimmer didn’t seem to hide anything – or it didn’t hide anything we could ever hope to find. It didn’t signal an illusory border, only a true one. Ciara jumped into the shallows and then pranced back out, her ankles tangled with seaweed.

  That night Ciara and I drank some longnecks while sitting on the sand. Many other people did the same. Some even swam naked in the calmly churning tide, wading gracefully at the edge of the void in playful temptation. How different would Ciara’s town be if it was located here? Water might lend clarity to everything we had determined unknowable.

  Ciara said she felt like she was on television. That everything felt so obvious.

  We didn’t discuss anything for several days. We were too engrossed in the city’s finer details. The beachside suburb lived a life of weekends. Monday to Sunday people drank on the beaches. They laid blankets and canoodled on the sand. Their houses held sound systems that burst ripe with the music of cities. They delivered their bodies to the sun in exchange for gold. And the rest of the country also flocked to the shores, the water charitably caressing the edge, permitting the belief that everything was under control.

  In the mornings we’d climb out of the car straight into the centre of the world. Beer gardens lined the promenade to the east where shirtless men and bikinied women drank languidly in the sun, tranquilised by the heat and the ambience of televised sport. The road parallel to the sea thrived with cafés and restaurants, with the smell of grease and salt, with the sound of ceaseless life.

  Ciara seemed immune from bewilderment – instead, she noticed the small novelties, like the backlit advertisements on the stainless steel bus stops, the fairy-lighted bar district, and the gulls feeding on scraps along the bright green embankment. It was beautiful to be there. It appeared to be a place we might want to stay in forever. But each evening as we climbed into the car after midnight to sleep, careful to drape the windows with sheets, a sadness overwhelmed me. I knew we were only visitors.

  *

  The following week a man from the council warned that if we didn’t move the car it would be towed. The tank was empty and we had no money to fill it, so we sold the car to a group of English travellers. We waved as they drove away, then we lugged our plastic bags of cassettes and clothing to a nearby bus stop. I told Ciara that if worst came to worst we could just ride the buses all night, every night. It was the city.

  I immediately regretted selling the car, though Ciara welcomed the change. She said that we couldn’t just sleep in the car forever, because the people who lived near the beach had always looked at us funny. I hadn’t noticed, but they probably had. Besides, she said, she didn’t want to look at nothing forever. She waved towards the ocean shimmer, said that the water was boring.

  The bus travelled through residential streets, then long circuitous highways, and then into the city proper. I figured Ciara would never get bored in these parts. Even the sky was littered with sights: hundreds of windows to peer into; the luminous blues and reds of finance institutions and upmarket hotels; the helicopter sentries. We alighted from the bus at the central train station into barely-penetrable crowds of people all marching and sometimes running in our direction. A block away, on a dark narrow cul-de-sac lined with green bins, we entered a building signposted ‘HOSTEL’ in red neon. The narrow terrace smelled of dust, vinegar, and stale cigarettes, and the European man at the desk was not interested in us. Cockroaches skittered along carpet so threadbare it shone. For thirty dollars a night we rented a windowless room with a single bed and slept head-to-toe.

  Sleep was difficult due to the heat. We were forced up and out of bed at dawn, eager to breathe the comparatively crisp air in the park next to the train station. This park was where a lot of the homeless people of the city ended up for the night, curled beneath makeshift tarpaulins strung between trees. Some men slept balled up under coarse blankets, or, in some cases, a wilted piece of brown cardboard. Some sat in small groups and discussed their own matters, urgent arms flailing and voices coarse.

  When the park began to fill with rushing commuters we wandered deeper into the city. It was impossible to gain any insight into the way people there lived their lives. All were careful to avoid eye contact, even in pubs.

  *

  During those first tentative days in the centre of the city we’d pass the toxic heated afternoons in the tourist bars along the city’s main street. Even there, right in the centre, where only business was conducted and no one seemed to live, elderly men and women drank their schooners of beer while monitoring some or other sport. Ciara and I did the same, albeit in light conversation. We discussed the city and how, even while in the dead centre of it, it still appeared remote. The city wasn’t living up to Ciara’s imaginings, and yet it was very typically a city.

  One afternoon before rush hour, when the city felt its quietest, Ciara said she didn’t feel a part of the city at all. She felt like we were moving from vantage point to vantage point, spectating from the inside. She didn’t feel strange; she had expected everything to feel different, for her mind to find another course.

  We discussed the origins of the city. Ciara had an idea about it, because everyone did. We drank in pubs that had once held people who’d witnessed these origins first hand, and it was easier for people today to keep imagining that past than to surrender to the present. It was easier to imagine those spectral founders smoking at the bars, wet from a day of manual labour, than it was to think about who was there presently, or why.

  Ciara always drank more beers than I – too many beers, though I dared not say this to her. She’d started to resent practical considerations, such as our quickly-dwindling funds and the fact of us not having a home. She drank three beers a session at first, and then four, and then six. For each beer she smoked two cigarettes, until the end of the night when she would puff them ceaselessly, even as she stumbled back to the hostel where the sour European at the desk would shake his head. It was during these routine binges that Ciara would retell the same stories over and over: about her cassettes, about Friday Night Sounds and the futility of Thursday Night Sounds, about her efforts to spread banal myths in her town, about the city paper’s music writer, about how the world was going to end. She never touched on what had ultimately happened to her town. She appeared to believe that her town would take her back some day, that it lay inevitably in her future. Such was its grip that Ciara cared little about the motions of the city; she did not seem interested in picking through its impenetrable façade, seemed only eager to witness it through the yellowed glass of sports bars, ensconced safely in the televisio
n ambience so reminiscent of her disappeared town, in the company of drowsy men and women who shared our nomadic air. She seemed to be waiting for something to happen.

  Just as our financial situation was getting dire, I got a job at the Woolworths across from the Town Hall. This supermarket was unlike any I had seen before: it sprawled across three levels, plunging underground, and no one wandered the aisles listlessly with trolley in tow. People instead cherry-picked goods with the aggression typical of cities. The shoppers did not want to talk to me like they had in the town. Their aloofness was welcome at first, but then alienating.

  There are too many people here, Ciara said, seated at the sports bar near the central train station where we always met after my shift. Why would they be interested in speaking to you, she asked me. They don’t even see you. I only occupied the space between where they had come from and where they were going. She ashed her cigarette on the floor.

  *

  Eventually there came a time when I’d arrive at the designated sports bars after my shift and Ciara would not be there. Back at the hostel I would wait for her to arrive home, she drunker than every night before, and I would not hear an explanation because I worked the next day, when she would sleep her hangover off.

  At the weekends we would board the suburban trains at the central station and travel their full extent, never disembarking except at the end, only to catch the next city-bound train without ever leaving the platform. These were my most restful times in the city. Only during those listless train trips was I able to discern a truth about the city. It was only one truth among millions, but it was a certain one: the truth of the city was that its dimensions forbade ever knowing it.

  The stops on the various train lines seemed mystical, not completely inhabited, maybe just stopgaps between the city and the mountains. Surely no one had ever lived a full life in the neighbourhoods around any of those stops. Lidcombe, Auburn, Granville, Stanmore, St Marys, Hurlstone Park, St Leonards, Lakemba, Macdonaldtown, Redfern, and Ryde: the names were as plentiful as the plains past the shimmer, and if these names only signified places between one true location and the next, what of the vast stretches between them? And what of all the locations not near any train lines? It was a surprise we didn’t need a passport to enter. It was a surprise no one was monitoring our movements in the city. For those who dared disembark at these places, who ensured they didn’t get lost?

  *

  I visited a real estate agent in one of the suburbs. I told the man at the counter that I would like to rent a flat, or a house, or anything else inhabitable. The real estate agent was not eager to help. He looked at me with disdain and replied that he had nothing. I protested that there must surely be somewhere to rent in the city, since it sprawled in every direction.

  It’s true that the city is big, he said, after taking several phone calls. But it’s very difficult to find a place to live, because it’s very competitive. Living in the city is not just a matter of deciding you want to do so, and then doing it. He said I needed to be of a certain temperament. He straightened his back to demonstrate that he was of that certain temperament.

  He told me that if I wanted to live in the city I had to fight tooth and nail, to engage in lies and subterfuge, to mock up false incomes, to be someone else. He said I wouldn’t find somewhere in this surrounding neighbourhood on the income I had specified, nor within any stone’s throw, nor along the bus route up the road. I was better off getting on a train and going as far as I could before hitting the mountains. There I might find a place I could afford – although I should know that it would be full of poor people and I would no doubt be robbed every second night. I would probably need to get the cheapest flat available, and there would not be much pleasure in spending time in it, so it was best for me to rent a flat near an RSL or pub, and make that my lounge room instead. He waved an arm out towards the west and told me that I would probably become addicted to the pokies and die in debt to criminal elements. Or if that didn’t happen, I’d probably be mugged by drug addicts and immigrants every night on the way home. It’s just something I’d need to factor in, he said. Perhaps I should put aside money to give to the criminals. If I was lucky, they wouldn’t bash me. But I’d be lucky to encounter even those dire circumstances, because if available properties did pop up, other people in the city would rush to buy them. I’d be better off not bothering. He said it was about time people realised the city was full, and he waved towards a man passing on the street. He told me that I should consider moving to the country and farming food for the people in the city to eat.

  One morning when I dared wake her before leaving for the supermarket, I told Ciara about the real estate agent’s diatribe. She had heard much the same on her travels, but was less shaken than me. The city is full, she said. People have long thought the country was full. When she’d always told them it wasn’t, they’d insisted that actually, it was.

  I told her that it was a blatant lie for anyone to say that the city is full. I suspected the real estate agent was making things up – after all, people in the city did not feel obliged to be polite like they did in the country. The real estate agent was just being a normal city man, living true to his position in the world. If I’d laid several hundred-dollar bills on the counter and acted true to the city too, pretending that I was smarter and richer and better than him, and not just a man who works at Woolworths, then I would’ve found us a place to live within days.

  Ciara said that everyone in the city was frightened about the future, more so than in the town. They didn’t admit it explicitly, but they all seemed to know that big things were about to happen. They knew that the fewer people around them, the fewer people there would be to attack and loot them when everything collapsed. She gestured towards the water. They only want to protect themselves and their property, she said. She claimed that, unlike me, she spoke to them. None of them dared reference the coming catastrophe, but they all acted and spoke like it was a certainty, like they’d need to hunker down at some unspecified point in the future.

  She told me that everyone in the city speaks about the city in the same way people in the town spoke about the town. They say the city is not what it used to be. If she asks what it used to be, they simply reply that it used to be more like a city.

  It wasn’t always like this, the city people told Ciara. The city was once authentically a city. Now it was only where business was conducted. She was doomed for arriving late, she said, laying flat on the dank mattress. She was too late for everything.

  *

  We never again discussed moving out of the hostel; instead we just fell into a routine. I would arrive home at 7pm and Ciara would at some time long past midnight. She said she liked to wander the streets at night because some secrets are only fathomable after dark. I wondered what secrets she could hope to find in that city.

  Inevitably each night I fell into conversation with the elderly men who lingered in the hostel common room. They were all living precariously, much more so than us. Brian was one: he used to live in the Central West, and when he mentioned the region he gestured far west, with a vague wave that set upon nowhere. He’d worked as a rouseabout on various properties, but moved to the city when he’d injured his back. It was no longer feasible for him to labour, he said. I learned quickly that he loved the word feasible – everything was measured by its feasibility. He was the most assertive in his desire to figure me out, but only to the extent that I desired to figure him out.

  Brian listed some of the towns in the Central West that were close to the properties he used to work on. The names of the towns were familiar, but in the dim smoky light of that common area they sounded inconceivable. He’d travelled wherever there was work, hitchhiking the lonely narrow highways between towns, breaching the shimmers. He’d sheared at a station near Dubbo, picked grapes on the outskirts of Orange, built fences along plains to the east of Parkes. His life had seemed typical yet anachronistic, more mythology than real life, too consistent with so
me deeply held belief, so consistent that it did not feel true.

  One evening, as we sipped from cans of beer, he told me that it wasn’t feasible for me to live there in the hostel. It was where rooted old bastards ended up, he said. It wasn’t sensible to bunker down in a cheap hostel, especially with that young girl — he pointed out into the city — who couldn’t hold her booze.

  Brian believed that if we had no reason to be in the city, then we should leave. Even if we didn’t want to, the city would find out in good time, and purge us.

  I spoke about my abandoned book on disappearing towns. Brian did not dismiss it like I expected an upfront elderly labourer would. And he listened deeply to my speculations about the towns that used to dot the Main Western line. I felt no confidence anymore speaking about my book. Its memory tightened my chest, wracked me with fears of tedium. And that held true despite my having witnessed a town disappear, I told Brian. It had been a normal drowsy town of substantial population, and people barely noticed it as they rushed through the highway on the way to the city or the country proper. I had always believed that a town like that could contain certain truths I could include in my book, truths the likes of which everyone wishes to have confirmed. At the very least, I’d believed I’d find a town that suited me.

  Brian had nothing to offer in exchange for my admissions. He only nodded in silence, a silence similar to that which I’d noticed all men who thought themselves proper men shared: a noble abstention from speech, averted eyes expressing a stoic empathy.

  *

  I could feel my grasp on Ciara loosen with every day that passed. Although it had never been my goal to have a grasp on Ciara, I’d come to appreciate her seeming reliance on me. I had grown to regard her as a person I could rely on to feel uncomfortable with.