Dead Straight Meanders

In many respects those twenty-five years had been hell, a hell of hospital waiting rooms and police stations and courtrooms and the Melbourne Clinic three times a week, holes smashed into the plaster walls too, detectives interrupting their breakfast, God help them, and Wendy’s weeping suffusing his dreams with the worst of it. In hindsight he seemed to have been peering through a looking glass into someone else’s bizarre nightmare. But if the works of Huxley or Orwell had any relevance today, it was to demonstrate that people could grow accustomed to just about anything if given the impetus and the time.

Months went by. Academia grew intolerable. Grading mountains of essays and exams had never been an ambition of Bryan’s, not to mention the job – the office, the lecture theatre, the smell of fresh photocopying – was tied to Wendy and the girls so intrinsically that he came to think of it as the final stumbling block on the road to some vital, undefined change. So he retired; the payout was big enough for him to spend a year out of work, to choose his next move carefully. The super was humungous. But that vast freedom, such as he had never known, was an immense rift in space and time that Bryan had no idea how to close. What else was there to do? What else was he good at?

He tried to write fiction but found the effort of transferring his ideas to the page exhausting, as if there was a fault in the wiring between his fingers and his brain. He re-read Tolstoy with far more difficulty than when he was a student and couldn’t bear to look at Chaucer. He sorted every bookcase in the house into alphabetical order. He took walks but felt weighed down by lethargy moments after starting, and thereafter couldn’t shake his obsession with how fake all the ‘scenery’ was, knocking on tree trunks and car bonnets to compare the sound and feel as he went. Three times he looked at the job classifieds; it was like looking at a broadsheet in another language.