The car was an AU
model Ford Falcon, one of the ugliest machines ever built. The sound of its
approach put me on tenterhooks and I jerked my head free of the hedge. I was
surprised at the number of painful scratches I suffered while freeing myself as
I couldn’t remember being scratched – let alone feeling any sense having to
force two objects of incompatible dimensions to fit together – upon going in. But
welts had already risen in crisscrossed scores on my neck and so it must have
been that other sensations had hidden the pain in a kind of sensory fog. I got
to my feet and spun around just in time to see that the driver had turned on
the radio; a retractable antenna rose in telescopic segments from the silver bonnet,
which looked clean in the sunshine. I saw the big aftermarket rear spoiler and
the taillights, shaped like huge prayer flags, pass Wilson in the direction of
the park. There were no bumper stickers on the back window that might have
suggested what station the radio dial was tuned to. I rubbed the welts on my
neck for a time, thinking that if one body part suddenly expanded, another must
have atrophied, and for a while I was convinced that my left leg, even if it
was by microns, had shrunk. Everything around me seemed to be in very faint
motion.
I followed the
car. The car, of course, quickly disappeared. Maybe, though, it was just that I
was imitating the car, willing myself to imitate the motion of it, because the
way I was walking was strange, faster than normal and yet unfatigued, as if I
could have kept on for fifty k’s without taking a hard breath. A lot of the
roofs on Lincoln had been solar-panelled during the big government rebates; the
panels looked like strips of motionless quicksilver from a distance and even in
a squint I started seeing purple. There was one roof with the intestinal black
pipes of a solar hot water system on it, maybe for a swimming pool. I realised
that, looking only at roofs and the sky, I’d drifted off the footpath and onto
the road. I could smell wattle, and leaves in the early, pleasant stages of
rotting and my own hair, curly clumps of which had come free of the ponytail
and blew in and out of my eyes and mouth. I made no effort to tie them up
again, or to get off the road.
I walked down
Grant, and for the second time that morning cut through the grass alleyway
flanked by houses with old wooden fences covered in graffiti, fences so low
that I could see all the K-Mart clothes hung out to dry and the barrenness,
interrupted by pieces of crappy play equipment or a toolshed here or there,
that was the typical Watsonian backyard. A good thing about the suburbs,
though, was that people lived lower lives; it made me sick how high people in
the city lived. In Mckinley again, this time I headed downhill past the dog
exercise enclosure, to the ponds. There were five of them, of identical size
and shape, like a line of little crop circles, partitioned by mud and
trash-strewn bulrushes. Beer bottles and the occasional duck bobbled
pathetically in the water, which was more grey than brown; once water had been
polluted badly enough its colour seemed to lighten again. Little pine
footbridges stretched across all five ponds, from one side of the bike path to
the other. On the railing of each bridge was a plastic-covered plaque with the
Banyule emblem and a blurb about a supposedly native animal – Ornithorhynchus anatinus Crinia signifera, Lymnodynastes tasmaniensis, Phascolarctos
Cinereus, Cheerax destructor – that
I was sure had never been, or would ever be, seen anywhere near those sad
waters. The whole arrangement looked like the part of a sewage treatment
facility that schoolchildren visited on excursion except that it had a bunch of
crumpled UDL cans and empty stubby bottles to anchor it firmly in suburbia. I
sat down on a little slope next to pond number three.
Sweat started to
drip from my nose; the grass I looked at between my crossed legs was yellow.
Salivating as though about to spew, I spat a few times and wiped my mouth with
the sleeve of the khaki King Gee work shirt I was wearing. The shirt reminded
me that I should have been at work. A few people walked past with dogs; none of
them were Labradors. I took off my Blundstones and Explorer socks and stretched
my legs out. By the time I tried to think about the boy, I was lying on my back
with closed eyes. I was untroubled by feeling the spit I had done seeping
through to the skin on the small of my back. Even though he seemed to be right there, I couldn’t get the boy past the
outskirts of my thoughts. Trying to think of other things was hard, too. Unable
yet to say whether I’d found the experience traumatising or just plain
ridiculous, it was true that a sort of posttraumatic lack had already seized
me, similar to the feeling I had had as a teenager when I watched a man
collapse in the Chadstone shopping centre food court. The memory of the man’s
convulsions and his concave facial expression, as if he had just eaten the
sourest food on earth, and the flimsy chrome-painted chairs he punched and
kicked skimming across the shiny floor like pucks on ice, came back to me. I
tried not to receive it. Then there was nothing in my head at all. At that
moment I felt a gust of wind on my face and heard a whooshing sound and,
sitting up, saw a shadow growing on the grass in front of me. I covered my head
and ducked; there was another whoosh and then a painful jab to my right hand.
The shadow disappeared for a time, before growing again as if by magic. Whoosh:
I wasn’t hit. On its final three swoops the bird, probably a magpie but I would
never know for sure, seemed to miss me by increasingly greater margins, until
by the third I couldn’t even hear the whoosh. They were swoops, I thought,
which for all their chest beating were really about contrition: the bird had felt
bad about hitting me and consequently appeared even weaker than before in my
eyes, even more vulnerable. I lowered my arms. I stood up. My hand wasn’t
bleeding.
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