Katy broke up with me and I could see a fly, rubbing its little twig-like arms, in the café’s food cabinet over by the far wall. I’d been seeing things in hyper-detail a while now, I’m pretty sure. I was sensitive to sudden animal movements, hearing jet engines before they moaned across the sky, some nights I even laid in bed and I swear to you, caught the light leaking through the window of a morning.
‘And I’m sorry but it’s like…it’s like you don’t care about anything.’
It was Katy who said this.
‘Well I don’t know about all that,’ I said.
And then we were outside the café. There were wet, decaying tree smells. A jackhammer somewhere jackhammered. Across the street, a BMW cut off another BMW. The driver decided to let everyone know by banging his fist on the horn and opening his mouth wide a few times like a fish might. By and large it seemed like a day, of sorts. Katy had my hand in her hand, which confused me, but only for a moment.
‘I guess this is it, goodbye then?’
‘Oh.’
And I probably should’ve said something more, because it did sound like she’d pronounced the question mark too. But I sort of just shuffled my feet and did that pensive, squinty stare that at one point I think she loved me for. But it was Wednesday now, and pretty soon I was just standing there by myself feeling as though a large rain was approaching.
The thing about losing someone like that; maybe call her your brittle old grandma if it helps, or, your sick dog. Perhaps a distant cousin mangled in a car accident. You lose these people and time starts to collapse. You omit people from plans, strike their name out with black ink. I was Jenga with the bottom and top removed. I was hovering.
‘How’s Katy doing?’ nobody in particular would ask in weeks to come.
‘Oh, see the thing is…’ I’d say.
I was having those conversations already, with myself. And I was there for all of it, if only then, in my head, not later, when they actually occurred. A customer who I’d seen in the café earlier materialized beside me and lit up a smoke. She jutted her chin out and stared straight at the stucco across the road, as if to indicate that only it was worthy of her time, and that she was not to be disturbed under any circumstances.
‘Hi,’ I said. Afraid.
She turned her head to me about as quickly as an egg timer’s crawl. I had absolutely nothing to say, but I hoped that my asking her for a cigarette would domino to me being held in her arms while I opened the emotional floodgates up with the confidence of an unaccountable stranger.
‘What is it you want?’
But before any of that had a chance to not come true, her face jolted. She looked high above my head and and put a hand over her mouth. The sun winked. A car horn beeped. Her eyes followed from the sky toward the road.
‘Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, oh Jesus.’
Which at the time, came out with such speed and precision that it sounded like she was being re-wound. The road. A body. Like dropping a raw steak on a tiled floor. Or, smack your back as hard as you can with a flat palm. Flesh echoes. People from the street carefully moved towards the body in the middle of the bitumen. It looked like they were afraid he might get up and run. A couple across the street looked up and pointed to the building top adjacent. Perhaps their sleuthing – how? why? up there! – would solve this mess. Years later, after several therapy sessions, I’d come to learn that the body belonged to a Walt Emerson, who sometimes struggled with car repayments and making it to his daughter’s karate lessons on time. But for now, he was, to me at least, just a dead guy. Things started happening around the body. A fabric sheet absorbed liquid like a Shamwow. There were lights, cars, and people in uniforms who seemed to wear the disinterested expression of having seen this only yesterday.
I was twenty-four when this all happened. In my late forties, I’d have friends who’d watch their parents die, put kids in ICU, euthanise their cat; you get the last gift of adulthood then, when it, or something like it, happens. You start thinking about people differently. I’d gotten the gift then, at twenty-four. Around me, the crowd watched the road ahead with the religious intensity of a season finale. There was a lady with freckles. She wore a red dress. She could be dead tomorrow. A kid with a balloon was quickly shuffled past the scene. I heard a ‘don’t look sweetie.’ She was possibly on her way to dying. One old bloke just shook his head, unable to comprehend the matter at hand, or that one day, he’d also be dead.
I got in my car and drove to a friend’s house, and I swear to you, at one corner I almost went straight through a stop sign like it wasn’t even there.
Therapy
And then I was thirty-five and still not shutting the fuck up about Walt Emerson and the importance of karate lessons. My therapist slid his glasses down the bridge of his nose in a way that struck me as too practiced. He made a circle in his notebook.
‘But it’s not really Karate we’re talking about here, is it?’
My first and only response to anything the therapist said was to agree. He charged by the half-hour. I was lying in a sideways S shaped leather couch, sort of floating there, agreeing.
‘This is about responsibility. Perhaps, if I could go so far as to say…feelings of unmet expectation?’
‘Yes, sure.’
‘The man did not get to the karate lesson, like he promised, and that’s what’s upsetting you.’
‘Mm-hmm.’
My therapist smiled. We had nipped it. Right in the bud. I was told it was an expression, which he’d explain to me in the days following. This was after future payments had settled.
‘I’ll be outside a moment. Administrative things. Don’t you go anywhere.’
‘Yep.’
The tragedy of it all was that I could’ve had a friend talk five minutes with me and diagnose what I had. To do that, though, would require one such friend, and to be frank, I’m not ready to go into all that. Through the back window, I could see the therapist trudging through the oven hot carpark right to his Audi. He smoked for fifteen minutes then pulled out a second.
I got up and started looking through filing cabinets, office drawers, clicking random icons on the desktop, things like that. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but sometimes I’ve found just the smell of a person’s room, the way they organise their cutlery drawer, just pieces of people, really, can be more telling than a eulogy at their funeral. I pulled the second drawer from the left, found a bag of boiled peanuts and a newspaper cutout for a dominatrix with blue hair. You’re on your own with that one. I never worked it out. And, if it sounds like I was being unusually carefree about ransacking a stranger’s room, you’ve figured correctly. I’d passed points in my life where these sorts of things had reached their logical conclusion. I’d been found out, charged, kicked in the groin, all for a number of things. Once you realise that none of it really hurts enough as preventative, there’s a threshold you can’t come back from. I hope we never meet.
The door slid open on the far side of the room. A woman stood there and stared while I put the ad for the dominatrix back in the drawer.
‘Dr. Watt?’
I nodded. On my fiftieth birthday in fifteen years’ time my daughter would ask me to recall an embarrassing memory. This was a time that I’d struck from my mind because it was too embarrassing and stupid to hold in my head. So, I told her about the time I drank spoilt milk.
‘Dr. Watt, am I early or…?’
‘No.’
There followed a moment, followed by more than I could count on two hands.
‘No. Please, take a seat?’
The woman seemed to endorse this idea. She sat in the middle of the sideways S. It looked uncomfortable. My guess was that this was her first session, unless she was seeing a psych for memory loss and an inability to place faces. I sat down in the chair and felt the rise in character that an arse on an expensive leather tends to bring. It felt deeper than the role-playing that it was. I was a child playing a man, playing another, probably, better man. I was afraid, once again, that I wouldn’t be found out for this; that I’d just be some freak in a stranger’s chair with a soon pending court date.
‘So. What’s wrong with you?’
She squinted, operating small levers and pulleys in her brain to deliver an answer.
‘My husband left me. Also, I want to kill myself sometimes.’
‘Oh.’
I shuffled a few papers on the desk and thought about karate lessons for a moment. I could see that the woman wanted something from me now. I could tell that there were only so many words in the dictionary and that the right combination of them would fix whatever pain she had inside her. I knew that. I swear to you. I’ve sworn it to others too. This made it worse when I couldn’t find the right ones.
The Dr. Watt that wasn’t me walked back in the door and stared at the two of us. We were two kids who’d left another one out of the game. He took a deep breath.
‘You need to leave. Immediately.’
‘I think so too.’
She stood up as well, because she honest to god thought he was talking to her. It’s a crazy world sometimes. Isn’t it?
Movie
In 1998, sometimes I felt younger than I ever had before. Other days, I felt like an old man. At that point in my life I had a job but it hardly paid. I mostly just showed up because I’d been asked to. It really was as simple as that. See, the work started at about five-thirty, pm, once everyone had left the city with their briefcases and their shoes with heels that clack. I’d finish up around midnight. For a while there, the city got very quiet. There weren’t many people at all.
I worked for a company but mostly for a building. It was a seven-story behemoth, right in the centre of downtown. It was the kind of building that people would look at and call, ‘interesting.’ It was a shithole. Sometimes I spoke to myself while I worked.
On the ground level was a giant cinema that nobody had used since a screening in 1986. The second floor had a few office spaces for lease. Above that, were floors I’d never visited because the lift had dropped down its shaft three years prior and shook a janitor to death like a mojito. Local council couldn’t shut the place down after the incident because it was heritage listed. So, there I was, getting paid next to nothing mostly to make sure nobody walked in the space with four dollars-worth of petrol and a lighter to burn down a ninety-year-old building.
There were noises sometimes; the kind your own house might make at four in the morning. I think this was before the dead guy, so when noises would creak through the mildewed skeleton of the building, I’d hear the janitor. I never knew his name, and as I said, I only think this was before the dead guy. You know how these things go. It could’ve been my mother for all I knew.
I mistook a lot of people for friends those days. They were good days. The best. Always after great tragedy, people find pleasure in checking in on a person.
How’s it all going?
I’ve come to understand that question is a mugging. Usually it’s better for the person asking. People I’d gone to high-school with had, in some way or another, heard about things happening in my life. One night, Joe Benner called me in that big, old, stupid building. He dialled the landline and almost earth-quaked the place to its knees. At fifteen I nodded to him in a suburban shopping center. We walked opposite ways. He raised his eyebrows and mouthed to someone, another kid our age, walking beside him, ‘cunt.’
I think he had one of his own now. Sometimes I get hung up thinking about babies. How we’ll never tell them all these things we’ve done.
‘And you’re feeling ok, now? Pretty crazy thing that went down. Your mum, whatnot.’
‘How did you get this number?’
‘Someone else gave it to me.’
I couldn’t fault his logic. I also didn’t want to ruin this perfect, lottery moment. I didn’t speak for fear of pinching myself in a dream. Joe coughed and manhandled the silence.
‘Well, Britt reckons we have you over for dinner sometime.’
‘Oh.’
‘Well. Only if you’re not busy.’
I stared at the white movie screen a while until I saw astral planes. The kind pressing your fingers into your eyes will grant. They were radioactive and glowing.
‘I’ll have to check my schedule.’
In twenty-sixteen I’d be eating cereal and see a notice in the paper for Joe Benner’s death. His oesophagus stent would fail and I, for a moment, would forgive him. Later, his daughter would win the Young Writers Award for her one stanza sonnet, My Father, My Hero.
And then I was in the liquor store at the mercy of a wine section. I’d been wandering around for little over an hour and the attendant kept looking at me like one of those paintings with the eyes that won’t quit. Out of sheer panic I grabbed at a bright, yellow bottle and gripped it like a child’s maraca. It cost me eight dollars.
The dinner with Joe and Britt went about as expected. Britt would hold the white wine I’d brought with such zeal it might’ve well been a dinosaur bone. She thanked me so, so much. Later in bed, Joe and Britt would cuddle and be content with the fact that they’d done something for me. Before lights out they’d kiss their baby daughter on the head sweetly. Before all that, we’d all be sitting at the dinner table trying to think up anecdotes about high school that didn’t hurt anyone’s feelings. Did I mention they had a friend over that night too, who I met at the table? Did I tell you that I thought she was beautiful like rain on a dirty car’s windshield?
Katy passed me the gravy later and we locked eyes like we didn’t even know each other.
Séance
But you know how these things go. I went to sleep and woke up years later. It was like a movie, except in the movie version I would’ve asked the doctor handling my coma, ‘Doctor, what year is it?’ And he’d grab lapels and shout at my forehead crease, ‘My god, man, it’s’ _____ … He’d answer, is what I’m saying.
In my version, I knocked on a stranger’s door and was told to GET THE FUCK OUT in capitals. I was door knocking in a poor part of town. I’d lived there before, but thankfully nobody seemed to recognise me. Before I drove out there my manager pulled me aside. His breath was hot garbage in bad breath mint disguise.
‘Doing this for you, mate. I can see you’re struggling. But these interesting parts of town…’
I knew that he slept in an air-conditioned home and didn’t eat McDonald’s for dinner, so it was a struggle not to see his description of city armpit suburbs as they were.
‘Goldmine, mate. When it’s bad, it’s bad. But when it’s good, the sales are…do you see what I’m saying?
‘You might have to explain.’
And he was right. I was selling car insurance – or charity bonds, frozen meals, sometimes printer cartridges – to people who wanted to end my life on earth, or, give me what little savings they had left. It was exhilarating and humiliating, never anything else. They were some of the worst things I’ve done to other human beings. Mid-fifties I’d T-Bone a Mercedes, mostly my fault, that would result in the death of another man. I knew it wasn’t door-knocking, though. That was something.
I approached a townhouse the colour of snail shells. There was a straw welcome mat. Also, a no hawkers sticker on the screen door. I knocked and, for the first time, understood what Katy meant about being selective. The door opened, and a shirtless, potbellied woman regarded me gravely. There was a script to follow that made moments like this easier.
‘Hi there. Jeez it’s hot out here. You wouldn’t want to trade jobs with me, would you?’
‘I’m unemployed.’
‘Well, that’s actually perfect. We have a special plan just for people like you.’
‘What are you selling?’
I panicked because I’d forgotten. I was sweating. My leather watchband changed colour and probably stunk. It might’ve been pre-made curry for all I knew. It might’ve been cable. The things I supposedly had cause to care for often changed. I’ll say that until the day I die.
‘Could I ask you a favour? Could I have a glass of water? Thanks.’
Don’t wait for answers, I’d been told by the company. The woman trudged off to the kitchen, door still shut. For the time, she’d been obscuring the sofa behind her, where sat a young, curly haired boy. He looked straight at me. He could’ve made me cry if he wanted to, but he would, for the next fifteen minutes I stood there, keep his mouth shut. The woman returned with a plastic Spongebob Squarepants cup, but I wasn’t thirsty.
‘Angel or Demon.’ I said, with a company smile, indicating the boy behind her.
‘I don’t have any money.’ She said.
I nodded, understanding. There was a plan for people just like her. They could pay as little as 14.99 a month.
***
I walked home, because where I lived wasn’t too far from the armpit suburbs. I was at one of those points in my life where things just sort of happened. Life wasn’t senseless and maniacal like it was for some people I saw on the news, who’d been shot in the face or had their house burn down because of a faulty toaster; life wasn’t whatever the opposite of that was either. Things kept happening. That’s really all there is to say. I went to sleep and woke up. It was just one of those points in my life.
I’d been living in share houses a couple of years now because I liked the privacy. The Burke street house was a thing on stilts shot up from the ground, with a tangle of vines threatening to rip the whole thing back down to where it belonged. As I looked for the spare key under a pot plant, I heard voices inside. I was filled with sadness; the kind that baking a beautiful meal for yourself, and dropping it on the floor, tends to bear. I had no intention of speaking with anyone after the day’s work, a fact that my wife turned ex-wife would use in the custody battle for our daughter in many years’ time.
I opened the door, and a group of heads swivelled to my position. My roommate, Blade, spelled BLAYYED, pointed a finger at me and smiled. I wept internally for a million shot deer, now knowing how it felt to be lined up with a rifle and weak.
‘Oi, Oi. Come sit down.’
‘Actually, I think I’m going to-’
Blayyed cleared a spot next to him on the couch and opened a beer with his teeth for me. The contract was already signed before I sat down.
‘Thank you, so, so much.’
In my haste to avoid this experience altogether, I’d failed to notice that Blayyed wore a swimming cap tight on his head. Behind him was a tall, stone faced woman with a kebab skewer in her hand. She poked small holes in the swimming cap, and applied bleach to small strands of hair she’d sieve through the rubber. With his crop of white hair, he looked like a completely different person, older, somehow. It was strange. I still hated him.
‘Glad you came. We’re about to play a game.’
He was referring to the group of people gathered in the lounge. There would’ve been about twenty of them, all zeroed in on me. Nobody seemed to remember how to blink. People tousled their hands through other people’s hair, or, if they had nobody close, rubbed the exposed skin on their arms or fingers and purred. I think they were all on drugs. I was in the process of deciding whether this made things more or less bearable when Blayyed indicated to the coffee table; a black board with letters.
‘You ever hear about oi-gee?’
‘Ouija?’
‘That’s it. Now close your eyes. Now.’
To Blayyed’s credit, he would’ve made a great door-knocker. Eventually though, he’d end up as a butcher at a local grocer until he’d cleave his thumb and three fingers off. The work compensation would result in one of the best years of his life, where he’d routinely purchase rounds of drinks for strangers, who’d have to carry their own drinks back to the table.
‘Think of someone dead. Can be anyone. We’ve all got someone.’
A few people in the group nodded to the sage prophet. I didn’t like where things were headed.
‘You’ve got someone?’
‘Sure.’
And I wish I hadn’t. But, when someone says to you don’t think of an elephant, well, the declaration of independence probably isn’t running through your mind. Everyone got up and moved to one side of the room, leaving me on the other, sunk into the stained couch.
‘Keep your eyes closed. Focus on the dead person.’
I shut my eyes again. There was a deep, cool silence, and I thought for a moment that I’d in fact not been accosted by Blayyed at the door, that in fact I’d made it to my room and was just having a day, like I’d been having for some time now. That I’d gone to sleep and would wake up in the morning to knock on the doors of people I didn’t know, and later, I’d close my eyes again.
Something gripped my shoulder and spasmed like a fish muscling on dry land. A wet kiss on my cheek. I tore my eyes open, but everyone was still on the other side of the room, waiting patiently.
‘Who touched me?’
Blayyed looked at the group and adjusted his swim cap, excited.
‘None of us! We weren’t anywhere near you!’
I was caressing myself like the others now, partly out of fear, but mostly, to make sure I hadn’t just slept through swatting a fly, or else dreamed my mother’s kiss on my cheek.
‘Who fucking touched me?’
The others, still not blinking, opened their eyes a little wider because they heard, in the tremble of my voice, embarrassing things to come. They were also excited.
‘None of us, I’m telling you-’
‘Because I don’t want to be touched anymore? Ok. OK?’
‘Chill out, it’s all just a game.’
‘JUST STOP FUCKING TOUCHING ME. I DON’T WANT TO BE TOUCHED ANYMORE.’
I got up too quickly and knocked a beer over onto the shag carpet. I knew it’d stain. One of Blayyed’s friends sniggered, uncomfortable in the density of silence.
‘Ooooh taxi!’
And the crowd went wild.
Yellow
I had gout. Please, please don’t go. This is one of the last things I have to say. Promise.
Forty-seven going on forty-nine, I was, and I’m sure I knew it. I found myself working late nights, without people, like I had so many years ago. And if you think this has just been an account of the jobs I’ve complained my way through in this life, you’re correct. For what is work if not a little lifetime of introspect; a quiet, misery filled conversation with yourself. Ask anyone to explain their life and it always comes down to where they worked in 1975, or who they shared a mattress with a few years back. It really is that simple.
I was on my feet all night, shifting in pain, holding a STOP/SLOW sign for drivers nosing around a highway upgrade. Given it was four in the morning, most of the drivers tended to regard me through close-curtained eyes, or not at all. I wore a giant, tropical fish coloured parka so people could tell I was a person, not a discolouration in the night sky safe to drive though. And as I said before, gout, which tended to flare up with the long hours scare-crowing the side of the highway. My symptoms were different to the men I shared 6am drinks with though. My whole leg throbbed like a lightning rod before something was about to happen. It was a dark, burnt by ice like pain. But to this day I can’t tell you if things just happened, and afterwards I’d ascribe that feeling, or if I genuinely felt tragedy coming on like the smell of rain.
Pick one. It doesn’t matter.
The council routinely upgraded this stretch of road, always at night, so as not to disrupt the importance of people and their days at work. A few of us road-crew would toast to being on the outside of this demographic, after which we’d have a minute of silence for ourselves.
It was an ancient, arterial path that cut straight through the city; a kilometre stretch of bitumen to be repaved after great September rains that tended to ruin the previous year’s efforts, and so on. The road was being reburied with steaming bitumen, again, again, and I, like the others in fluorescent garb, honestly believed we wouldn’t have to do it again. Sit there and tell me I’m stupid all you want, sit there and tell me I should’ve seen the signs. You try working that job.
My leg started throbbing halfway through shift. The two of us, my leg and I, waited for something. A week earlier, things were in the process of being finalised according to my lawyer. If you ran your index finger over the custody papers my signature still would’ve been wet. The house, my former house, had sold at an underwhelming price. I think my wife, ex-wife, future wife, whatever she was to me at that point, would’ve accepted a gift card if it meant she could hurry up and leave already. Perhaps this was the danger my leg spoke of, and it was only catching up now.
A stream of people passed by in electric cars sounding like nothing more than a gust of wind. I couldn’t fathom what’d be so important as to require the 4am drive through the city, so to each of them I gave religious significance. Years ago, in the Burke street house, I’d wake at midnight to find Blayyed on the back deck charging Rose Quartz in the moonlight. It was beautiful to watch someone care so deeply for something stupid. Camry’s, Priuses, and other white-collar horse and carriages drove on to work, or, wherever else important they were going. I’d never see any of them again.
My ankle went off like a cheap firework, an electric, grabbing sort of pain this time. I bent to scratch at the purple skin, and when I stood back up, an Accord bore straight at me. Half asleep, half pretending the opposite, the driver stared straight through to wherever he was going. I feinted left and got sucker-punched in the lower intestine by a side mirror. I went down sucking in large gulps of air.
The tail lights receded, and I was alone again. I just laid on the wet tar a while looking at the gentle sky above, thinking now might’ve been a nice time to be thinking about something nice. What that something was though, I wasn’t sure. Mostly I just laid there, thinking about the thinking. Above, stars in paint by numbers formation, refusing to connect, refusing to make any sense beyond their own separation. But sometimes, I swear, you can’t help but see things. I wasn’t dying, just to be clear. Well, I was, but I hoped – really, I did – that it’d take some time.
About an hour later, yellow morning bled into black night. I felt the road vibrate and got to my feet. I turned the sign to red, stopped the station wagon, and just stood there looking at them all. There; the mother, father, daughter, staring back at me while I held my stomach, retching in pain. I kept them there for thirty minutes until they protested. Perhaps they were on vacation together having a short break away from that business of living.
I’m reminded of another similar time in my life, as I so often am. At eighty-eight, I’d cough blood into a handkerchief and wonder why I’d never bothered visiting the Grand Canyon.
*****
Photography Credit: Jason Rice
Liam Lowth is a writer from Brisbane, Australia. His fiction and essays have been featured in Tincture Journal, Veronica Mag, and Writer’s Edit, among others. Liam’s story, ‘Jennifer Aniston Eats Strawberries in Paris,’ was performed in Adelaide at the 2017 Quart Short Summer Event. In 2018, Liam graduated from the Griffith Film School with a Bachelor of Film & Screen Media. His creative disciplines in screenwriting have seen the development of both short and long form written screen work in Australia, the US, and Canada. In 2019, Liam was the assistant director for the Queensland premiere of Kill Climate Deniers at Metro Arts with THAT Production Company. In 2020 Liam was a beneficiary of the Regional Arts Development Fund to write a new Australian play titled: Failure to Launch.
