The Boy I Saw on Lincoln
Lincoln was one of those incidental neighbourhood
roads you only walked down on the odd occasion, out of caprice or boredom, or when
the idea of taking your regular route home from the train station or the shops
had come to be degrading somehow. Very short and straight, you could have rallied
a tennis ball – with a few bounces – from end to end. The streets it ran between
were called Grant and Calvin and there was also a Wilson Court in the middle –
a handful of houses backing sleepily onto an old wooden playground. I think
that the boy who I am going to write about was the first person I ever saw on
Lincoln. He is certainly the first (and only) one I remember.
*
I was standing on the footpath outside my house
at twenty to six in the morning. Steve – the boss of the landscaping company I
had recently moved to Watsonia to work for – was ten minutes late. The street
was quiet except for the birds and the sky was so clear and white that it
looked to have had a curtain of muslin thrown over it, the sort scattered
around our bedroom because Sarah bought it at op shops to make baby clothes
with. Almost overcast at first glance, it had the kind of crystal pallour you
saw from the windows of an aeroplane that was above the clouds. While staring
at the sky I noticed within myself that combined feeling of power and impotence
that came with waiting for things while being half asleep. It was nice. You
could loll your body around like a slinky while your legs stayed anchored to
the spot; every movement, every perception so unfocused and guiltless – without
giving two shits whether the thing it was that you were waiting for ever came
or not.
My mouth still felt coated by the filmy residue
of Sarah’s cornmint oil mouthwash, which I hated but had used in a rush instead
of doing my teeth. On my work clothes I could smell the shavings of the Mirbau
deck we had been building at a house on Zig-Zag Road the day before, and could
feel the shavings in my pockets and at the heels of my Blundstones. A couple of
cars went past and with them another ten or twenty minutes. The exhaust fumes
the cars put out hung in the cold air a long time. I was on the lookout for
either Steve’s work van – one of those turbo Mercedes rigs that all the rich
young tradies like him got around in – or the Nissan Patrol he took pig hunting
on weekends. He was never late picking me up because time was money; I was in
no hurry to call him because I didn’t need the money that much and I was
feeling all right where I was. But after the sky had been uncurtained to its
full sunlit blue, I was awake enough to realise that something must’ve happened
and that neither the Mercedes nor the Patrol would be coming that day.
*
Sarah would be another two or three hours
getting up. Awake and washed and fed as I already was, I saw little reason to
go back inside and decided to take a walk. I didn’t have a regular route, but
headed downhill for a block and then cut through the big park, called McKinley,
where Sarah and I had picnicked on the Sunday of our move. In the park I saw a
few people out walking their dogs, and a very skinny elderly bloke plodding
along the path in clothes that seemed too young for him and too brisk for the
spring air. I saw that the footy oval was glistening with dew and that the
cricket pitch was being readied. The smell of the wet grass sort of rushed at
me on a gust of wind, which I drank in and then gave back out as reluctantly as
possible. I saw that a lot of the bins were stuffed to the brim with beer
bottles, but didn’t venture as far as the dams at the other end of the park, which
was where most of the teenagers went to get pissed.
Pretty soon I had left McKinley; some time
after that I found myself on Lincoln. It was a road built to the same suburban
blueprint; the squat yellow brick houses, cement porches, brown-tiled rooves;
the crooked letterboxes stuffed with junk mail; the kerbside trees with burnt
flaking trunks and ‘V’s taken out of the top of them so as to thread the
powerlines through; the surprisingly lush kerbside grass; the presidential
namesake.
I was just passing, or had just passed, the huge
firewheel tree when I first heard him. There were no firewheel trees anywhere
else in the area as far as I knew, and I admit that on a few occasions I had
picked some of the spidery red flowers on that one, which was some way into
somebody’s front garden, for Sarah. They were like the little scentless
skeletons of umbrellas upturned in a storm. Sarah was a girl who still got a
kick out of receiving flowers, or pretended that she did, and I liked to think
that the kick I got out of giving them to her was grounded in something more
edifying than the link between flowers and getting to fuck her. I suppose this
was confirmed by the fact that I didn’t pick them very often.
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