Salvage

Run-off ruts these littoral roads, below bluffs like parapets patrolled by sea eagles.  On bald tyres he lurched and slid like an accident test dummy. Hearing and seeing no other vehicles so early, he wades in bone-cold brine, his legs sun-damaged, keeping a sharp lookout for stingrays. Joyce’s scrotumtighteningsea is so right, he thinks, scanning the coastline constantly, a scrounger living cheaply, ready to salvage or scavenge.  

Twice he has snipped an ear cutting his hair with scissors, depth perception deserting him.  Blood.  Blood.  Blood.  Before stark dream-filled sleep in winter’s dark, he felt familiarity with rising dread reading another favourite leading novelist whose memoir of his parents, an inventory of muted regret, steered from its first page inexorably towards their deaths. He mourns lost excitement, seeks the solace of his vocation as if sheltering from hard rain under a viaduct, tracing, then shaping, past events, like a forger.

If you knocked on his door, with its trellis of moonbeam patterning the panels, it wouldn’t be locked. You’d find no woman there anymore, except those staring blankly from photos, and a Barbie Doll, a blonde joke on his desk, a (uh, oh) round-figured number birthday gift. He listens to plaintive melodies like Chi Mai on his phone in evening’s corner, voices of the wind in trees sighing. Faces are remembered, words spoken; that brief encounter at the fair, the smell of old sunlight, a slow night train. His daughter talks about his sister in palliative care. If he was slow to welcome you it wouldn’t necessarily mean he was averse to conversation. He could be narrating virtual messages from the dead. Though fictionally operatic, there is nothing metaphysical about them. They are based on reality. Some models might recognise themselves in different tales.

Awake late, his mind roils like the tide eddying as if spreading shocking rumours. He analyses chaotic episodes constructing make-believe. Characters teem through his vivid past: their adulteries and other weaknesses, problems inherited from parents and God knows which other ancestors, lies, subterfuge, trust shrivelled by shitty greed-driven betrayal, even a touch of the crazies. He deals with bedsitters’ loneliness motif, that oft-recalled smell of frying sausages, booze, and the blessed discovery of books. Reading Bukowski’s, or Lydia Davis’s whimsy, makes him laugh, but his throat constricts with heartache the French call tristesse, that sensuous word suggesting lasses’ tresses, transporting him along alliteration’s rhythmic boulevards.  Light from an Anglepoise lamp leaches through his door’s cracks in his quiet haven where so many other doors on his vanishing world are re-opened.

He trawls childhood. When he was fourteen, fled from family spite to his sanctuary of glacial cold, a furnished room in the city, he became used to living alone, his existence harsh, more masturbation than mastication, his diet doleful. He rode the tram to work, or saved fares by walking, buoyed by the streets’ freighted atmosphere such as filmic steam vents, the sheer reek of this. Always near-broke, working weekend overtime cleaning knitting machines over a drive shaft, his skinny arse perched on an upturned drum almost touching the spinning pulley-belt, he plucked thread from a gear as the machine changed its cycle. The piecework operator had cajoled him into leaving his machines running while he cleaned. It was, and is, a dog-eat-dog world. A cog crushed his thumb tip. He shrieked, reeling in red-raw shock, his drum almost toppling into that wicked belt.

A boy in bloodied overalls numbed by morphine, trauma dressed, still soporific, he wafted through Shangri-La, a cascading glittering tranquility, a splendid opiate state of corny movie-like scenes. His thumb tip smaller now, hard days done, he writes of narcotics rife among the sad, the downtrodden, hearkening back to when he cradled that violated digit’s increasing throb post-paradise on the groaning tram. In his silent room with the wishes in his heart and what they made him do, he was his own nurse. He gleans the too-brief ecstasy, the ensuing sick leave, meeting a girl who lived in a corner pub, its beery whiff when barrels were unloaded. Those days – all his life really – stretched ahead to be recalled as material like newsreel ghosts, sorted in the lamplight of his ramshackle studio.

He reflects on three recent occasions he has been woken in the morning’s wee hushed hours by ambulances’ fiercely flashing lights in the near neighbourhood; busy noises, doors sliding and slamming. None of those three old men returned home. He roughs a plan for another piece, this time with a religious theme. He hopes the three men, now in death’s shadow, were comfortable with their beliefs. Taken in by well-meaning Christians as a youth, too feral, too selfish, to be tamed, he remembered how they competed in self-righteousness like fun runners with their P.B.s. He rescues a bird trapped in his unlit stove using a towel, googles world politics. Its vengeful direction disgusts him. He writes something before he forgets, using many commas patiently corrected, salvaging what he can, then dances all his pain away to Such a Night, heartbeat furious, but good for his legs, after taking his medication.

Ian C Smith’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds, Cable Street, Griffith Review, Honest Ulsterman, North of Oxford, Rundelania, Stand, & Westerly. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.