I believe words wrought, my experiences, including some of woe, of hurt, represent memories more vividly to me than photographs of smiles, or home movies of showing off. I savor this accounting from when I could not imagine the shadow speeding my way that was old age, nor its acceleration, as a rich man might enjoy sun-dappled days aboard his yacht slapping oil on pink flesh. Venturing into a sudden bedlam of streets below cities’ girdered hives, precious notebook pocketed, cellar turned up against a blur of rain, hunched in the traveler’s jacket I still have, I logged an inferred life. Now I am forever shriven by words.
Seeking the grace of accuracy in this new place of withering cold, I fled disapproval and responsibility. My rationed lifeline a sparse nest-egg, dollars exchanged, climate, culture, relatives, left behind clandestinely after several wrong turns, I wanted to limit regret. Freedom started with that empty thick notebook, my phone – public booths with occasional witty graffiti – and an inadequate rented heater in my attic room under spasmodic rainfall’s lash. Muffled voices of tenants, late-night TVs below, and distant incantatory sounds of city sirens, signaled this frugal fresh start. Pre-dawn, wearing my jacket like a talisman I prowled a canal bank, triggering a pizzicato of pigeon wings, lights refracting from the water being sniped by yet another shower.
My passport much stamped, I also lodged with a landlady whose god was profit. A spoon of light in the hallway led to the hairy shared bathroom, a challenge, as were my wee camping gas stove and the bare flimsy walls that moved when I blue-tacked them with the comfort of maps. Volatile, in a state of high alert, I sensed there would be no further chances at the mad tango of life on the edge if I had waited any longer. My only drawbacks then were a suppressed pale tinge of remorse for my hasty flight, time and expenditure’s passage, and that bathroom’s ravenous electricity meter.
Far-off, a motorbike races the night. My cat’s soft thump disturbs my reverie in our bed made up permanently on one side in this neglected house back in arid Australia, the years fugitive now. The hall clock’s ticking contrasts with eldritch noises at any hour from beyond that attic. The night markets’ glittering malfeasance, risk-taking, led to exit wounds when, already believing I would linger over those events these years on, I woke to days suggesting a possibility of pulse-quickening shadowy mysteries. These culminated in meeting her and researching a TV series episode about a vanished relative of mine we watched from the network’s green room. Thinking it appropriate, I sometimes drank whisky. The real drinking came later.
A virtuoso of error, I hear the river swept under our bridge a quarter of a mile distant from where we buried our pets beneath cypresses, The sky huge, a cow bawls across the gully in the direction of the old school bus route. The overgrown former road alongside a creek, a rugged landscape painting I traverse in boots and shin guards on hot afternoons, wends through rampant blackberries, and sinkholes. Muscling under and over fallen boughs I have encountered tiger snakes, a wedge-tailed eagle on the ground, kookaburras, echidnas, a kangaroo and a platypus, but few people. From that ghost bus I conjure laughter, my house in view from an angle above the gully, looking back.
Those happy kids would also have seen shops, a cobbler’s and butcher’s; today, only traces near my home, a post office then, now the last building left, where books have replaced mail. Those glimpses could not show all that was to come, and, one distant day, be over, a universal mercy. In dull disgrace, hoping for even a mizzle of yesteryear’s northern rainfall, I revisit clamoring characters in the written maze of when and then, the years’ rumbling roar fallen away. I shall stay put for as long as I can, gleaning adventure from long-stilled scenes, echoes from those lineated images, the throb of my days, more than could possibly fit on a headstone.
Ian C. Smith’s work has been widely published. He writes in the Gippsland Lakes region of Victoria, and on Flinders Island, Tasmania.
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