Ones And Zeroes

Non-Fiction
Location - Melbourne, Victoria
Written - July 2007
[Another Dead-End Job Blues, in D-minor. I was confident this piece might be picked up by a publisher, but so far it’s been rejected by everywhere I’ve sent it to. I still believe it has promise, and may attempt another edit at some stage. If you have any suggestions or feedback the please let me know!]


I’m starting to wonder if the old ladies are right when they say it’s a sin to ring on a Sunday.

‘G’day, my name’s Tom, calling from Telnet, and we’re conducting a study on-.’

‘Don’t you people realize it’s Sunday? You call me all the bloody time… It’s, it’s an invasion of privacy!’

(‘Off the record m’am, I’d probably agree with you – such are the ironies of my existence.’) ‘Sorry to have disturbed you, have a good afternoon.’

And I’m talking to a dead line.

‘G’day, my name’s Tom, calling from Telnet, and today we’re just conducting a brief study on behalf of the –.’

‘Oh hello? Hello? Survey? Oh no, no. I am not interesting…’

(‘Being interesting is not a requirement of this survey, sir. It’ll speed things along for both of us if you have no complex opinions at all. We just need you to give a rating from one to five…’) I’m already typing in the code for ‘Refusal’ as I say, ‘no worries, enjoy your afternoon.’ A fresh number is being dialed.

We don’t use a regular telephone in market research. All the dialing is done automatically, by a computer.

‘9582-3641, hello?’

The older man says his phone number in a sing-song tone, as if he’s repeated it for years. I know the feeling. I feel like replying, ‘yes, hello nine-five-eight-two-three-six-four-one, this is one-zero-zero-one speaking, I was wondering if I could speak to thirty-seven-two-ninety-four there please.’ I have this supervisor who has a strange habit of addressing me by my full name. ‘Hello Thomas Rye!’ He says. I’ve started replying, ‘ah, call me one-zero-zero-one.’

‘Yes, hello there sir, my name’s Tom, calling from Telnet-.’

‘What?? Is this a telemarketing call? I have a house full of sick people, don’t call back!’

I don’t get the chance to connect on a level of understanding, and tell him that years of share-house living means I know exactly how it feels to live in a house full of sick people. Am I cold? Inhuman? No, I don’t think so. Maybe I’m just tired.

Next number.

You quickly learn a sense of detachment working in market research. The majority of people abuse you, or simply hang up, within moments of hearing your voice. When you’re in a good mood it doesn’t splinter you. You just say, ‘have a good night, Sir,’ or ‘M’am,’ and move to the next number. It’s part of the job to get flashes of everyday rage, people telling you to ‘fuck off!,’ rants about the evils of market research, people asking you to take them off ‘The List’ (which doesn’t technically exist – in most cases numbers are randomly generated, by the computer), and phones slammed in your ear, but tonight isn’t going so well.

In five hours I make 460 calls. For five completed interviews. Not including the time spent on interviews, that’s about one call every twenty seconds. I read out the introductory spiel two hundred times a night.

A computer screen becomes my scenery. I steal glances at my fellow workers, just to glimpse a human face. I see the mannerisms – weird repetitive movements. Some stand and sway on their feet. Some tap their legs up and down, for hours on end, to keep the circulation going. I’ve seen similar behaviors in mental wards. My habit is tapping my fingers on the keyboard, to a beat that seldom changes.

Every terminal is filled with Uni students, lost souls, and unemployable misfits struggling to make a buck. I don’t want to be here, I guess none of us do. I’ve yet to hear anyone tell me it was their boyhood dream to work on telephones. But I’m a student without qualifications, and this is one of the few types of work that people like myself can get. The only thing that keeps me dragging myself out of bed and into the cold, and rain, is the promise of travel. Of the Himalayas.

I put my headset back on.

‘I’m sick of you people.’

(What does that mean? You people?)

‘Well,’ I say, ‘Us people will leave you to your dinner, m’am, good night.’

Who are ‘we?’

We are Trained Irritators. We are the force of disruption in the lives of people trying to watch ‘Desperate Housewives’ after work. We have a sixth sense for calling ‘at the worst possible time,’ we know when you’re sitting down to dinner. We will ring you when you’re in the grips of a life-or-death emergency, we will call you ‘just as you’re headed out the door.’ We’ll call at the moment of consummation on your wedding night. You’ll hear from us the instant you’ve found your infant son gleefully menacing his sibling with a syringe he’s found in the gutter. And my only question for you, the general public, is this. Why do you choose to answer the phone at these times?

But don’t mind me, I’m just jaded. I know I’m a Professional Pain-In-The-Ass, and that makes me defensive. I know you might be expecting a call. I know you have the right to rest your feet without being bombarded with inane questions. I understand that you may want to spend evening-time with your children. I don’t feel good about hassling you at these times. But I’m not asking for pity, for like the faceless Concentration-Camp Guard I must take responsibility for my choosing my line of work. I just have a few things to say about it.

We’re never too sure when our shift will finish. It depends on how soon we reach our quotas. When we’re released I look at the lights of the city. I’m walking to the tram when I see a workmate at the lights waiting for the man to go green. He’s an older bloke with frizzy gray hair, as if he’s been logged into the computer for too long and become electrified. He tells me he’s just worked a thirteen-hour shift. I ask how much he earns working for that length of time. ‘It isn’t enough,’ he says.

You can spot the ones who work those hours. They have a hollow look in their eyes, a distance, as if they’re gazing at an infinite horizon they cannot focus upon. They’re usually older, beating at some wall of debt with bare hands. There’s a sadness to them. I ask if he’s thought of returning to university. His passion is robotics. I suggest he could design an android that looks and speaks exactly like him, which could come in and work his shifts while he studies. I’m trying to make him laugh, but he doesn’t.

I think it’d be better if we were machines. But, of course, the public would never buy it.

I’m walking to work again. Past the strip-clubs, and underground, to the dungeon.

‘Okay, I’m willing to do the survey,’ a lady says to me, ‘but I don’t think you’re going to like what I have to say about the banks. I’m very cynical about it all.’

There are times when I drift off to sleep mid-survey. During someone’s impassioned diatribe I’ll find myself in a haze, dozing, or thinking of something else, only to snap to attention and ask the next question as if I’ve been listening the entire time.

‘…banks aren’t interested you if you don’t have any money,’ she says. ‘They don’t care. Their profit is their bottom line…’

‘Uh, sorry, just to remind you, m’am, I can’t actually record your thoughts verbatim at this point of the survey, if you could just give a rating between one and ten.’

‘Well, I’d say somewhere in the middle.’

‘Do you think you could give it a rating out of ten?’

‘Oh, about four or five.’

‘Is that closer to four, or closer to five, do you think?’

‘Well, that depends, I mean, when we were trying to get a home loan we….’

As the night grows long I begin to move to the rhythm of the machines. Where you don’t even really hear what they’re saying to you anymore. You just listen for the keywords. It might be ‘seven’ or it might be ‘completely dissatisfied’ - in a sea of other words - and that’s all you hear. You plug in the relevant responses, and ignore the rest. You ignore the tales of misery from the lives of ordinary people caught in the blackened gears of society. You ignore the ranting abuse aimed at banks which you have inadvertently become the voice of. You build to a hyper-caffeinated frenzy, just trying to get through the long survey as quickly as you can. And waiting for the keywords…

‘…which really frustrated us, so I think I’d have to give it a four.’

4.

In it goes. Next question.

I remind myself that I am lucky. That I have no debt. That I am saving to travel. I reiterate every comforting mantra that I know of, even as my mind and my voice begin to disconnect and I’m losing the last element of human connection involved. I speak in a drone. Like a machine.





I’m sitting on a tram, with a different set of headphones in. The music becomes a soundtrack to the frantic morning hustle. It’s sad to see the sea of suits and dead eyes, the peak-hour soup of elbows and knees, the cattle-truck madness of being herded to a fate we don’t understand. But we are bound for no slaughterhouse. It isn’t as dramatic as all that, for we will return tomorrow. Our bodies will move along the same routes, but our souls are elsewhere, only becoming increasingly more distant, more faint. Dulled by the dazzling fluorescence of trams, and work.

A friend tells me he’s worked so many 13-hour shifts of market research that he conducts surveys in his dreams.

‘G’day my name’s Tom, calling from Telnet, and we’re conducting a study across Australia on financial institutions, it takes about fifteen minutes if you’d –.’

‘Fif-teen minutes!?’

Phone slammed in my ear.

Sometimes I get utterly sick of the sound of my own voice. That’s a strange feeling. My voice becomes dry, husky. I cough in-between calls. My leg bounces on the floor.

‘G’day my name’s Tom, calling from the Telnet Group, and we’re conducting a study across Australia on banks and- .’

‘You people take up enough of my time and money as it is. Don’t call back.’

‘M’am I don’t work for a bank-.’ Dead line.

Only someone who works in banking could imagine that twenty minutes of inane questions about obscure banking concepts could possibly be an appealing prospect. Most of the questions are globs of financial-speak that roll off the tongue with all the finesse of an oral bowel movement. A few hardy individuals agree to do the thing - usually the elderly, lonely housewives, and people with money - but even then it’s just an exercise in profound mutual boredom. A few questions in, you can hear their voice droop.

Rote questions promote rote answers.

I learn they’ve just made the survey longer, so now it can stretch over twenty-five minutes. The banks don’t seem to understand that their survey to discover what people dislike about banks (‘why do they hate us??’) precisely embodies the very things that people react against – the uncaring stance, the instrumental attitude towards people, the greed… and it’s down to us market researchers to do their dirty work. We’re the voice of their attitude.

‘…is this survey going to go on much longer? I have to head out soon.’

‘We’re about halfway through…’

‘Oh, no, no. Sorry. I have to go.’

I have become the voice of their attitude.

They could slim the surveys down, make them more interesting, more human. More verbatim questions rather than scaled ones. But I can hear them say, upstairs, ‘how do you quantify that?’

All they want is a document to drop upon the desks of the decision makers, a document which says ‘47 percent of people presently say they are completely satisfied with our customer service. That’s up two percent from the last quarter.’ And then they huddle to discuss ways to slash employees whilst maintaining that perception.

They want statistics, not the truth - which might be harder to quantify.

‘G’day, this is Tom, calling from Telnet, tonight we’re conducting a study across Australia on financial institutions-.’

‘Why do you people always call right on dinner time?’

(‘Well, actually M’am, it’s because we’ve installed cutting-edge technology which can detect, to a precise level, the exact moment when you’re sitting down to dinner, so we can call at that very moment. Isn’t that neat?’).

‘Enjoy your dinner,’ I say.

‘What?’

‘I said enjoy your dinner, M’am.’ I’m hungry myself. I think about what I’ll eat when I get home. The shifts run late, so I often work on an empty stomach.

Why the paranoia?

Picture something with me. Imagine your friend is angry at you. And you, being a concerned friend, are understandably keen to understand, like the bank, why it is that they’re angry. Now imagine that in your efforts to understand, that you begin reading off questions from a premeditated script: yes/no, scaled, and agree/disagree questions. Your friend would, predictably, be left with an even worse impression of you than before.

Why?

Because you’ve gone about things the wrong way. You have subtly imposed your own thought structure upon them, your own way of seeing the world, when it is quite likely that it’s this very way of seeing things that has caused the problem in the first place. You have set the tone of conversation with rigid boundaries of your own devise. If your friend is angry with you, then you listen, right? You listen to their way of seeing things, even if it doesn’t fit your categories in some neat, quantifiable way.

In attempting to learn about their customers, these companies and organizations are perpetuating an image of themselves as cold, bureaucratic, rigid, and uncaring. They perpetuate this by the very means by which they seek to escape it. And so it goes on. A stream of ones and zeroes.

I do something I’ve never done before. At the end of the shift I approach one of the supervisors.

‘Hey, uh… I was just thinking, that uh… I think that the people who write these surveys should ask our opinion on them every once in a while. I think they’re out of touch with the experience of actually conducting them, you know? For a start, the surveys are too long… We could trim them down, or even divide them into two separate surveys. I’ve had two people hang up on me tonight mid-way through a survey… It doesn’t make sense to irritate the few people willing to do it by bombarding them for twenty-five minutes. If they have a bad experience, they’re less likely to do another survey down the track, you know? In which case we’re serving to destroy our own industry.’

She looks at me with a half-smile, as if she’s heard it all before. She says, in the nicest possible way, ‘well, I agree with you in some ways, Tom. But Telnet gets paid based upon the length of the surveys.’

She smiles again, before turning back to her computer screen.






I should have paid less attention in high-school. Become a farmer. I think I’d like that. But if I only talk of banks then I haven’t told the full story.

My main gripe has always been a feeling of moral repugnance at gathering information for bloated corporations. Sometimes I do surveys on child health, public transport, immigration and political issues. A council survey, asking questions about people’s local communities, seems more like something that could improve people’s lives. I don’t know if the councils will actually keep local parks tidier, or fix roads, or build new libraries because of the work I’m doing, but it’s easier to sit through an eight-hour shift in the belief that I’m doing some good.

In my job, I just ask questions. I’m not allowed to give my own opinions. But here I might humbly suggest to you, the general public, that every now and then, amidst the din of banks and ‘people trying to sell you something,’ there’s surveys being conducted that might even be worth your time. That might be one of the few opportunities you get to have your say, outside of elections. Just a thought.

Every now and then you hear a tale that cuts through the haze like lightning to your chest.

I listen to a white Australian saying we should have less immigration.

‘From any particular countries?’ I ask.

‘Yes, from Middle Eastern countries,’ he says.

‘Are you thinking of any Middle Eastern countries in particular?’

‘No, all of them. All of the Arabic countries,’ he says.

My next interview is a Lebanese man who’s lived in Australia for twenty years. He tells me that recently he’s been abused in the street, and bashed at the pub.

I listen to a woman tell me that there’s times when she runs out of food, and can’t afford to feed her kids.

‘What do you do when this happens?’ I ask, from the script.

‘The children come first,’ she says.

I listen to a bloke tell me that his ex-wife is threatening the lives of him and his children. He’s bringing them up as a sole-parent. He’s on the disability pension at the moment, for depression. I build a good rapport with him. I break from the script and thank him for telling his story, I say that most blokes aren’t willing to talk about divorce, which effectively means the male voice is under-represented. He beams when he hears me say that – I get the sense he doesn’t get much niceness in his life. At the end he thanks me, he says it’s good that surveys on the effects of divorce are being done. It makes my night to hear that.

When people are pouring out their hearts you cannot help but be compassionate, and pay attention. The people who analyze the statistics will never hear these tales, as they pore over the ones and the zeroes.

‘G’day, my name’s Tom, calling on behalf of the Telnet Group-.’

‘It’s Sunday, you know.’

‘Yes, I know m’am. Soon we won’t be making these calls on Sunday, you’ve probably heard about the new legislation. I know we can be a pain in the behind. I don’t mean to disturb you, I can leave you to it, if you want.’

But the old woman is home alone, and she says she’ll do the survey anyway.

I listen.

‘I’m married,’ she says. ‘But my husband is in an old-folks home, with Alzheimers. I looked after him for a year or two but I couldn’t keep up. I have no money left. The fees at the home are so expensive – I’ve been paying for his accommodation out of my pension. None of his family is willing to help out… It looks like I’ll have to mortgage the house.’

How do you code something like that, in ones and zeroes? It gets us talking. I hope the supervisors aren’t listening in.

‘I think you’re an incredible woman,’ I say. ‘My mother has Alzheimers,’ I find myself telling her, ‘so I have some small idea of what it must be like for you.’

‘Yes it’s terrible, terrible… How much longer do you have to work today?’

‘Oh, I’m almost finished,’ I say.

‘Well you have a great afternoon when you’re done.’

‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘Same to you. I’ve enjoyed our chat.’

For just a moment it’s not ‘us’ and ‘you’ anymore, but ‘we.’ We, who may share a moment of understanding. The anger is gone, along with the hostility that only reduces our world to binaries, like the computer I tap at, which does not listen, or care, because it cannot.

To be human, again - somewhere in the space beyond ones and zeroes.

‘Thank-you for your time, good-night.’

Mrs. McDonald

Non-Fiction
Location - Adelaide, South Australia
Written - December 2005
[This piece marks a bit of a shift in my style. It’s told in the present tense, in the experience rather than recalling it. I prefer this style, it feels more intimate - the reader learns things as I do.]


Mrs. McDonald is no prisoner to her fate. I watch as she makes another escape attempt in slow, shuffling footsteps. Held upright by her walking frame. Her slippers make no sound upon the floor. The duty nurse isn’t paying attention; she leafs through a copy of New Idea and sips coffee from a thermos. Mrs. McDonald slips right past her. The nurse looks up with pregnant Philippine eyes, and the expression on her face is resigned. I can tell she doesn’t want to be here, either. In another world she’d be in the first flushes of love, out in her boyfriend’s car with the windows down, the R&B tunes flowing through her hair. When she spots Mrs. MacDonald she alerts the other nurses.

The doors to the ward are locked. Electronically controlled from the front desk so you have to be buzzed in or out. South Ground Ward is where they put the ‘Wanderers.’ The Alzheimers patients who cannot be relied upon to stay put. And every time Mrs. McDonald sets off upon a meandering quest for freedom, two or three nurses stop her at the doors, and try persuading her to return to bed.

“Come on Mrs. McDonald,” says a male nurse. “Come and have a sit down in your chair.”

“I want to go home!” she screams, and her rage is ageless.

Her wrinkled limbs flail to push the nurses away with preternatural strength. As I watch, she becomes locked in this epic altercation half a dozen times in an hour. Her ancient eyes look as if they’ve seen through time, her face is locked in a grimace of bewilderment and disgust.

The older nurse returns with a forced smile and a roll of the eyes.

“You’re lucky to have a mother like you do. She’s no trouble at all.”

Most of the nurses seem to like my brother and I. We’ve coined a term for the look they give us, the W.N.Y.B. look. What Nice Young Boys. Not the Philippine. She sees right through us, as we see through her nursing uniform to the exotic treasures beneath.

Mrs. McDonald is brought back to her bed and takes a seat, breathing deep gusts of exhaustion. The older nurse turns to us, and says within earshot of Mrs. McDonald, “she’s been difficult from the first day she came in.”

Mrs. McDonald says nothing. She sits and blinks at her surroundings, her mouth hanging open.

When we came to the Alzheimers ward this morning, we entered our mother’s room to find an old man asleep in it, his body rumbling from a hawking snore. We were told Ma had been moved to one of the four-bed rooms, which are less private, and more hectic. That’s where we met Mrs. McDonald.

Her name was written on a whiteboard above her bed, scrawled in black texta. Ma’s whiteboard was blank. I found a texta and carefully wrote ‘Brenda Jacobs’ on it. Mrs. McDonald doesn’t have so many visitors. Earlier in the day I saw her daughter come in, and the two argued the entire time. The daughter repeated, “no you can’t go back home. There’s no-one to look after you there. Who’s going to look after you there?”

When Mrs. McDonald isn’t looking we take our mother to Lizzy’s Café. We’re buzzed through the electronic doors and out into the sunshine. I wear my sunglasses as we sit at an outside table, and chain-smoke. Ma talks of the Great Apes. A couple of days earlier we’d brought her in a few books to read, just to provide a counterpoint to the women’s magazines the nurses stack by the side of every table. The books have reignited Ma’s passion. She talks of how terrible it is that gorillas and chimpanzees are caged for medical experiments, or for the entertainment of humans.

“I wish they could all be released back into the wild,” she says.

When we were kids Ma took us to see Gorillas in the Mist at the Morwell cinema, the true story of Dianne Fossey’s time in Rwanda with the mountain gorillas. Even with gray hair, Ma looks just like Dianne Fossey.

Back on the ward Ma has her dinner there, waiting. My brother and I filled her full of roast beef, so she doesn’t eat. Mrs. McDonald doesn’t eat either. The nurse is trying to sit her down with the tray.

“No, I don’t want to eat that, I have to get home. I need to catch to bus on Trimmer Parade, people are expecting me.”

And then, when she is sedated, Mrs. McDonald speaks with calm.

“No, that’s okay dear. I don’t think I’ll eat here. I might as well be heading off now, I’ll catch the bus back to my place. Can you show me the way out of here, dear?”

The nurses face creases with irritation. She sits on Mrs. McDonald’s bed, with a spoon hanging impotently in the air.

“But it’s so late, Mrs. McDonald. Perhaps you can go home tomorrow.”

Lies.

I turn to Ma. We have only hours left together. My brother and I are catching the bus back to Melbourne. Exhausted, I sprawl out on the hospital bed while Ma sits in the bedside chair. I know how sensitive the topic of a Home is to her. I don’t want to upset her. But I can’t lie to her.

“Ma, Mike and I have been doing a lot of thinking, about how we can get you out of hospital.”

Mike sits by her side, takes her hand into his. “But we aren’t going to make any decisions you aren’t happy with.”

I play with my pair of broken sunglasses. I’d bought them only days before, and then one of the plastic arms on them snapped this morning. I almost cried when it happened. I bandaged them up with medical tape to hold them together.

“We’ve been looking into an Aged Care Hostel for you Ma,” I say. “But we’re not sure. We’re also looking at ways that we can get you back to your home. The main reason the doctors won’t let you go is because they’re worried that you’ll wander off, and get yourself into trouble.”

“It’s all very silly really,” she says. “I just tried to go to Centrelink, but I caught the wrong bus and got lost.”

I notice I’m fidgeting with the sunglasses, and place them on her bedside table.

“I know it’s silly Ma,” I say. “But if it means getting you home then maybe you could play along, and not go off walking by yourself. Maybe you could walk with Pat from down the road.”

Mrs. McDonald is off again. She’s yelling something that I can’t make out.

I get up off the bed and kneel on the floor, next to Mike. Each holding one of our mother’s hands in our own. “The honest truth is that we don’t know what to do, Ma. But we’re doing our best to get you home.”

“It’s nice to know there are people who love me.”

“I don’t think you have to worry about that, Ma.”

The nurses are leading Mrs. McDonald back to her bed, but she struggles when they try to sit her down. Ma gets up and walks over. She sits down on the bed, and Mrs. McDonald eases her own brittle frame onto the bed, next to her. They’ve never met before, and yet they beam like old friends. An alarm sounds and the nurses leave.

Mrs. McDonald smiles. “Oh it’s you dear. I remember you. We met down at the bowls club didn’t we? You used to play bowls?”

The Hound

Non-Fiction
Location - Melbourne, Victoria
Written - November 2005
[I wrote this one about a mate of mine. He was flattered at the time, these days he tells me I can do better.]


The Hound sings like Tom Waits, and plays harmonica like No Man. He dresses in leather for smoky bars, with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other. You may find him at the open mike, howling words of fire with his eyes closed. I think he wants his voice to be rusty; he wrenches it through the cigarette-strained chords of his throat with a deliberate imprecision. He sings the blues, plays the keyboard, or slide guitar with crooked hands. That’s when he looks at peace.

I don’t see him all that often. The last I heard he’s moved into a new house across the road from Chopper Read. I think The Hound would have a few stories to tell him. The man is always creating something. He seems to understand that even conversation is an art - you get the sense that his quips are improvised Blues lyrics that he just happens to be speaking. There’s a beat to him, a rhythm to his language and movements. I don’t play as much guitar as I used to, but being around him makes me want to pick up a guitar and start jamming to that beat. The Hound is a beat. The only thing about him that isn’t rhythmic is the monotone hum of his wheelchair.

I met The Hound through my brother, who’d met him at a pub somewhere. He’d seen The Hound’s swaying gait, as if forever on the precipice of some shattering fall, with hands that cannot quite grip to the edge of the bar, and assumed he was cataclysmically drunk. My brother drank twice as fast to keep up, only to later learn that The Hound has mild cerebral palsy. He said to him, ‘sorry man, I thought you were just drunk.’ The Hound smiled, and said ‘I was.’

The first time I met him I made awkward small talk. He was dressed up in black leather and dark sunglasses. I didn’t know what to make of him. As much as you’d like to believe that a wheelchair would not change your impressions of a person, it can become a ball of cotton wool around your conversation. I cautiously observed, ‘you’ve got the Bob Dylan glasses going.’ He replied, ‘no, these are Hound glasses.’

He can be an irritating bastard at times. The personality quirks, the moments of pushiness, the control-freak streak, the wisps of self-righteousness. The unsettling complexity. Yet it’s all a part of a uniquely twisted whole, which cannot help but seduce you with the love a mother reserves for her most difficult of children. There is just enough tension between The Hound and I to keep things interesting, as at times he can seem to disagree with everyone on just about everything, and puts a twist on it all with his acerbic sense of humor.

The man is a contradiction. A twenty-first century blues man. One time he brought an ounce bag of weed around, but he can’t roll joints for himself, so we started a production line of joint manufacture for him. The Hound insisted he had a philosophy essay to write, and asked us to roll him a few before he got down to work. The Hound has a unique taste when it comes to joints. To say he likes them strong would be to misunderstand. My brother rolled up what he described as a ‘Planet-Killer.’ The Hound wrapped his lips around it like a connoisseur of fine wine, drew, and commented, ‘a bit heavy on the tobacco, isn’t it?’

There was no university work done on that eve. We moved into a night with the texture of a dream. My brother and I on foot, The Hound in his wheelchair, and the traffic swimming past us on Nicholson Street. The Hound set his chair to full speed and wore a demented grin as my brother and I careened backwards in front of him, screaming as if he was some random stranger attempting to run us down, waving our hands around in a desperate plea for help from the general public. We stopped in the parklands to burst into a spontaneous and guttural hymn, booming out a single syllable in ominous chords. A pagan ode to the night. Myself on bass, my brother on the middies and The Hound on treble. We harmonized for a monistic chant in downtown Melbourne. We were going for ten minutes or more before we snapped out of it and spotted a pair of commuters at a nearby tram stop gaping at us as if we were mad. We laughed so hard that we couldn’t go on, and went home.

People admire The Hound. I think they respond instinctively to his spirit. And yet they don’t always know how to deal with it. He inspires a faux-pity that he doesn’t need. People want to surround him in cotton wool. And so he plays up to it.

One time he was in Myer, zooming about in his wheelchair, and entered a lift with an older lady dressed up in jewels and fur, strutting around with an expression on her face as if she’d just noticed dogshit on her shoe. She giggled nervously as he screeched into the elevator. She threw him a bone in all her benevolence, gesturing to his wheelchair to say with an awkward smile, ‘why, you could really hurt someone with that thing.’ The Hound looked at her and dead-panned, ‘you oughta see my knife lady. It’d slit you up a treat.’

Bouncers often try to turn him away from pubs because they think he’s drunk. And then, when he is, he staggers around inside drawling to strangers: ‘I just took ten pills,’ or ‘I found a syringe in the gutter, stuck it in my arm, and ended up like this.’ One time his electric wheelchair was stolen from the front of the pub as he left it outside. The next day went to the police station to place a police report wearing a T-shirt he’d made especially for the occasion that read, ‘Parole Is Fer Poofs.’ People don’t know what to make of him. Sometimes I wonder if he knows what to make of himself.

I remember a party that I went to but wasn’t in the mood. I sat out the back, smoking cigarettes, feeling the darkness strangle up my mind. The Hound came and sat with me. I told him I was scared that I drink too much. He sat with me for a couple of hours and we talked it through. I suppose sometimes you laugh at the lifestyle, sometimes you cry. We both drink too much. The only difference is that when I walk home I sway from side to side along the street on my feet, he sways from side to side in his electric wheelchair, his fuzzy hair pushed back on his head from the wind.

Once you get to know him, tales of The Hound take on a mixed air. One time he arrived home from a long night out, he’d been drinking with a punk who’d shaved The Hound’s head into a Mohawk, and dyed it bright red. The Hound staggered inside to search for food, and managed to prepare himself a bowl of soup. He lifted the bowl to his lips, stumbled, and the hot soup slipped from his grasp to splatter his face, scalding him. He collapsed on the floor shortly after grabbing the first cold thing he could find from the freezer. His flatmate found him in the morning, passed out on the kitchen floor with his new Mohawk, surrounded by carnage, his face bubbled with burns and a packet of frozen bacon on his forehead.

We laugh at the things that torment us. His mother died around the same time I broke up with my ex-girlfriend. I was in the depths of grief, and the relativity of The Hound’s situation made me feel guilty about my own sadness. We were two sorry-assed bastards for a while. We played a lot of music at my brother’s flat, in Carlton. I remember sitting with him on the edge of an oval, talking. He said his last girlfriend cheated on him with ‘all of his friends.’ He hasn’t been with anyone for a while. He said that girls don’t take him seriously. They pat him on the head, and flirt with him, and consider him Safe. I guess they figure a man in a wheelchair won’t want to make love. Won’t be much like any other bloke.

I guess love doesn’t always come for free.

The Hound attracts a mythology. He is a party enigma, a drunken angel. People remember their encounters with him, and the tales of his life so easily become legend. People latch onto the guy, and drain him for a vision of themselves. But I think the truth is always more simple than that.

I like it best when we’re playing music. Then we don’t need any defenses. Our cigarettes burn to a stub in the ashtray, and the beer remains in the bottle for the time being. We don’t have to use our legs. All mythology is gone. There is only an acoustic guitar, an old harmonica full of spit, and we sing the blues until dawn.

Driftwood

Non-Fiction
Location - Gippsland, Victoria
Written - September 2005
[The idea for the story came from my brother Mike. He gave me the idea and central metaphor, I just wrote it down.]


I remember the first time I saw something die. It wasn’t like in the movies, with a groan and then eternal rest. It was slower, and more desperate. Sometimes it is difficult to say when life ends.

Long before the Alzheimer’s disease, our mother used to take us camping. She’d drive us to places like Cape Innes, Wilsons Promontory, and Croajingolong National Park. We never helped her to put up the tent. She’d do it on her own, as my brother and I would be manic with the joy of exploring our surroundings, running off into the distance with flailing limbs. One time at Mueller River we decided to go fishing, like our father. We’d bought a package of expensive frozen bait from the service station, hooked pieces of it onto our cheap fishing rod, and caught nothing. A man told us to throw the package away, and taught us how to catch these tiny local fish which made better bait. He kneeled with us in the sand, and pushed small pieces of bread into a plastic lemonade bottle, which he anchored in the shallow water of the estuary. When my brother and I returned we found a fish trapped inside, as small as one of our fingers. We were excited. We took the bottle from the estuary and held it up, to see this fish gasping, and dying, and with every dying breath it would swallow another piece of the bread, even as all the water drained from the bottle and its movements became faint.

We felt like murderers. It took all three of us, our mother, my brother and I, to put the dead fish onto a hook and cast it out into the sea on our fishing line. When we reeled in the line the tiny fish was gone, and we were left with nothing but an empty hook.

We didn’t fish any more. I think we mostly loved to create. The beach was a field of imagination for us, and we’d invent games for ourselves. Once we made an entire 18-hole golf course among the dunes, with nothing but a tennis ball, a tent-pole, and an empty spaghetti can that we’d move from hole to hole. A passing woman smiled, and took a photograph of us.

But most of all I remember our favorite game. We’d build sand castles down on the waterline. On the smooth, hard sand between the surf and the dunes. We were never interested in building them up on the dry sand, like other people. That didn’t make sense to us. We’d wait until we knew the tide was coming in, and build our castle a few metres from the waters’ edge. A grand monument to beauty that might take us hours to create. We’d decorate it with seashells and pieces of driftwood. And the castle would be strong. Glorious. Our mother would wait for us up in the dunes, sometimes reading, but mostly watching us, with a mind full of poisoned, schizophrenic thoughts, that frighten me to imagine.

By the time the castle was finished, the first waves would come. Nothing but an impotent pulse at first, washing ever closer to us. My brother and I worked together, digging trenches, constructing walls of sand around our castle. The lapping water would be diverted by our cunning trenches, and be held back by the walls, which would soon be washed smooth as the water licked over them. We’d leap over each other in a kind of instinctive unison as we worked. Always careful to avoid crashing a careless leg into the castle we protected.

The tide would come in. Sometimes this game would last for hours, sometimes for days, but it always ended the same way. The lapping tide would turn into a rising froth. We’d be called in for lunch but there was no time – even a moments’ break would be time wasted. Our walls would collapse, and the first seawater would burst through to caress the base of our castle.

We must have looked mad. The waterline would now be twenty metres inland from us, and the froth would turn to breaking waves. All around us. We’d hurl our entire bodies in front of the coming seawater. Using our arms and legs and bronzed torsos as a barrier of flesh, then scrabbling to our feet to pack sand against the castle’s base, as sections became undermined and its structure became unsteady. Our backs would burn under the Australian sun. We were never too interested in sunscreen. There was no time.

And our castle would become misshapen and deformed, until you could barely recognize it. Cracks would appear, and vast sections would split away and crumble. The ornate decoration of driftwood and seashells would be carried back out to sea on the receding waves, and its watchtowers would collapse, until we were protecting little more than an amorphous pile of sand. A pile that an ordinary person wouldn’t care too much about anymore, unless you happened to love the thing.

We fought the tide until it was pointless, and then we fought some more. We’d scream terse instructions at each other in high-pitched voices, with the kind of frantic determination you can only muster when it’s a game you are going to lose. The castle would be underwater for moments at a time. We’d have to wait for the instants when the water receded to see our castle once again, and even then it was but a small mound that we’d slop more wet sand on top of, in futility, as if paying mere homage to a memory, and soon it would come time to accept that our castle was gone.

We’d return to camp to pick the dead skin from our sunburned shoulders. Our mother would crouch over a gas cooking stove to make us dinner as the winds swirled all around her. Back when she seemed as strong as any castle. I’ll never forget the sound of the surf as we slept in our beds. Sometime after the sun had gone down the tide would roll back, and leave pieces of driftwood on the shoreline for us to find at dawn.