The Town
Page 22
We had walked into one of the oldest parts of the city. And it looked old, but truthfully it wasn’t as old as it looked. The buildings were designedly old, and their grandiosity was laboured, attention-seeking. There was a library here, probably the biggest one in the whole city. I implored Ciara to follow me inside. Maybe we could find some books about the disappeared towns and about her town. Maybe I could feel at peace that I was no longer writing a book of my own. Ciara wanted to wait outside and smoke, but I insisted she join me. I wanted her to learn about her region. It seemed important. She followed me in, maybe because she felt indebted to me.
We passed through the turnstiles into the library. Ciara told me that they had books in the underground city, even though barely anyone read down there. They were all too busy talking. Everyone had a lot to say. Their circumstances were so novel that they never tired of wondering what might lay in their future. Books didn’t have much to say about the future. Nothing true. Nothing that could really anticipate life.
As we passed through a huge chamber full of reading desks, Ciara whispered that there was someone down underground who was writing a book about the underground. It would be silly for the writer to try to publish it, she said, but she was going to try to publish it anyway. Ciara thought the writer was only writing it to be certain there was a book about the underground city. There needed to be a book about the underground city.
I found a terminal that you could use to search the library’s catalogue. It was necessary because every book ever written in the country was available in the library, and some were even kept in dark rooms to ensure they didn’t fade. Shelves lined every wall all the way to the ceiling, and there were dozens of rooms, all tall and wide, lined with smaller shelves of lesser books.
Ciara supposed the book about the underground city wouldn’t have anything about all this, and she gestured at the city and all the books. It would be a new type of book, on a topic never addressed by any other. This book would be about them, the underground city inhabitants, and not anyone else. To think, she said, that their history would have a whole hidden layer, that everything above ground would be unwritten.
Imagine people reading it after the world ended. Everything we took for granted now would be cloaked in mystery. Everything around us — and she waved her arms in all directions — would be the ancient history. Ciara said she’d definitely read the book then.
The terminal searched not just books but the indexes of books, and it was only in these indexes that I found small mentions of Meranburn, or Bocobra, or Gumble, or Garra. I searched ‘disappeared towns’ and found nothing. Many of the names I had found on obscure maps resulted in no search results. And yet there were many hundreds of books about the city, and about other cities in other states. People argued, via books, about specific truths pertaining to their origins. There were books about the feared expanse long past the Central West, and many about the mountain ranges west of the city, where people had laboured under torturous conditions in what seemed to be a truly historical fashion for years at a time.
I searched my name, and found nothing. I searched Ciara’s name, and found nothing.
Ciara said that they’d only need one book about the underground city. It was being written as the city grew, and it would never even need to be edited. If the city was bombed or some other catastrophe occurred, there would only be one book left: theirs. No doubt other books would be written, and no doubt some of these books would try to relate from memory what had been there before, but it’d be obscure information. They’d just be books written for the sake of existing. She flicked a shelf contemptuously.
I suspected she was accusing me. But she seemed oblivious, lost in her thoughts, as I typed into the terminal. And then there it was: I found a book about her disappeared town. A substantial tome of 439 pages. Published fifty years ago, written by someone whose name I didn’t recognise. I pointed to the screen. Ciara read the short title out loud, which was simply: The History of ____.
I wrote out the details and took it to a librarian. She knew the book was there in the library somewhere and only wanted to find it for me – she did not want to know why I wanted it. We all walked together for ten minutes, out of the main gallery, up narrow stairwells, through escape doors and then back down again, and then up ladders, through trapdoors and attics, and then down into another library, an alternate library, where people sat reading at tables too. Then, from that chamber, we entered a long tunnel lined with nothing at all, until we entered another room lined with books, with a low ceiling and no computer terminal. She pointed at the book and left.
I set it down on a reading table and flicked to the contents page. The first chapter was not about McGee’s cattle or the drought, nor was it about the town in particular. Books of such heft often spend many chapters qualifying their substance. I suppose those qualifications were evidence enough that Ciara’s town was important, in some buried scheme. Books of that kind need to labour in order to lend credibility to the content inside. How else would someone feel inclined to read about a disappeared town?
The first chapter seemed to align closely with the beginning of the country. What is this book about, Ciara asked. It’s about the town, I said. She pulled the book towards herself and flicked through the last pages, to see if she was included. Have a look at the contents page, I said.
The book did not concern itself with Ciara or her contemporaries. It had been written long ago. The contents page itself was two pages long, proof enough that many events had occurred in Ciara’s town.
Ciara was amused that the last chapter was about the train station, about its grand opening. I didn’t read over her shoulder, because I had long suspected what she would find.
We may have spent days in the library. Ciara read the book from beginning to end, taking great care to study the glossy black-and-white pictures, which featured illustrated flat expanses dotted with gums and figures. They also showed early photos of her town, streets lined with horses and carts. And then, finally, a train parked at the platform, with a lone figure standing in the foreground. A silhouette, but unmistakable.
When she finished the book she did not speak. She exited through a nearby fire escape, into a quiet back alley of the city, and I didn’t think it right to follow her. She took the book with her. I don’t know if there’s another copy.
*
On the morning I left the city, brown-clothed elderly people marched the main street. Men and women stood on the footpaths, solemnly observant, faces carefully severe. The elderly marched to remember a war. It was impossible to believe there could ever be a war. I suppose I had spent too long in towns.
But there had been a war. Everyone was certain of it, though it had been a long time since. There was a dreadful mood on the main street of the city. A bugle sang forlornly, and it might have been one of Ciara’s cassette tapes, the way it wavered in the chill autumn breeze, merging with distant traffic, reverberating off the crystalline faces of impossibly tall buildings and into the central park where many onlookers sat. Children cried. Perhaps it was because they saw some of the adults crying. The adults seemed to have lost something, or gained something. From that eerie melody, more an anthem than anything else, they found a longed-for unanimous sadness. And from that unanimous sorrow grew camaraderie, and then, I don’t know. The past they marched in memory of seemed more valuable than now. All those people standing on their picnic mats on that crisp autumn morning in the city. All those people with other people. There was rarely another time that life was more certain.
If there’s a town in the countryside where I belong, it might already be hidden by some impenetrable shimmer. How could I ever arrive at it? What if it’s an island, or a crawl space, or somewhere in the sky? If I did stumble on it one day I might not even know. I suppose the right vantage point would need to present itself. Maybe it would be obvious. Maybe I would arrive and know — with little to no resistance — that I am of that town. If I was, and if I understood why, I do
n’t suppose even then that I could ever stop the town from disappearing. No town continues to just be a town. No answer remains true to the end.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Rachel, Edith, Darcy, Elizabeth, Phil, mum and dad. Thank you to Brett Weekes and Rosetta Mills for their work on making the book look good, and thank you to Chad Parkhill for proofreading it. Thank you to the friends who have tolerated me bringing up this book in conversation. Also, my most appreciative thanks to editor Sam Cooney, for not only editing the book so closely but for everything else he did related to the making of the book, and for being such a tireless and passionate advocate for words in this country.
This book is set predominantly on the land of the Wiradjuri people, to whom I pay my deepest respects.
About the Author
Shaun Prescott is a writer based in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales. He has self-released several small books of fiction, including Erica from Sales and The End of Trolleys, and has been the editor of Crawlspace Magazine. His writing has appeared in The Lifted Brow, the Guardian and Meanjin, among other places, and The Town is his debut novel.
Copyright
First published in the UK in 2018
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
Published in Australia in 2017
by Brow Books, from TLB Society Inc.
(trading as The Lifted Brow) www.theliftedbrow.com
This ebook edition first published in 2018
All rights reserved
© Shaun Prescott, 2017
Cover design by Faber
The right of Shaun Prescott to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–34563–2