LEAVING TOWN
By Leigh Blackmore
© 2008
Ever tried shoving your life into a cheap suitcase at the last moment? It’s no fun, no fun at all.
God save us from marketing people. You are precocupied with what’s happening in your own world and the phone rings. It’s someone with a Bombay accent. “Good morning, is Mr White in?”
You know damn well they want to sell you something – a new phone account or upgrade. “No, he’s not in,” you reply.
“Oh, can you make decisions about this phone number?” You grow irritated quickly. You’ve already lost the thread of what you were trying to do.
“Look, I’ve got a child in the bath at the moment. Can’t talk, sorry. Goodbye.” You put the phone back on its wall cradle. “Bloody hell”.
The bed is strewn with clothes you’re trying to pack up. You can’t think straight about what else needs to go in. All you know is, you have to get out. You stand awkwardly at the end of the bed. You blunder about for a while, shoving more random items into the suitcase. Then you sit down heavily on the bed. Everything seems to have gone out of you, like the wind out of a heavyweight boxer who’s been punched in the gut.
Later, you wander the streets of your neighbourhood, passing the other houses. You can see the people who live in them in the late afternoon light, moving about in front of computer monitors and TV screens, black shapes watching ‘Big Brother’ or whatever other crap is distracting them from their real lives. You walk along Rowland Ave, one of those long, winding, heavily-populated streets that connect Coniston and Mangerton. A street full of houses with garages where men work illuminated from behind like cutouts, in garages full of old bikes, cardboard boxes overflowing with old children’s books and toys, lengths of wire and rubber matting and half-empty cans of paints that will ‘come in useful one day’. Where retired couples who left Sydney twenty-five years before bring each other Cups-of-Soup. You are taking a last look, because you don’t intend to be back.
You drive over to the TAFE and wait for her in the open-plan food court. Orange moulded plastic chairs are stacked up next to plain, serviceable, wooded-topped tables. A cleaner, wearing blue jeans, a blue short-sleeved shirt and a blue peaked cap, and a five o’clock shadow, mops up around the tables. A roof-mounted television faces an area of low uncomfortable lounge chairs, upholstered in a uniform cheap orange plastic. “NIB can cut your physio, chiro, and optical bills in half for just $9.95 a week!” “The next programme is recommended for Mature Audiences – Some Violence” – followed by an old episode of the police soap Blue Heelers.
At the left-hand wall, a noisy group of teenagers plays table-tennis in front of a series of noticeboards plastered with ads and flyers. There is a blue vending machine with a red and yellow Smiths Potato Crisps logo, and two of the inevitable red machines filled with cans and bottles of Coke, and the Coca-Cola logo imprinted vertically on the side. Students – Asian, Middle Eastern – munch on chips from brown paper bags, or on hamburgers. There are Lazumba coffee logos on the metal barriers that separate the food court proper from an elevated stage area with a trompe l’oeil painting of a window punched through a wall of brick. Beyond this a lone seagull hovers in a cloudy sky over a cerulean sea and some purple mountain, fringed at sea level with a line of green trees running close along the shore.
Hospitality students, looking semi-professional in their white button-up chef jackets with double rows of black buttons, cross and re-cross the space. Metal crossbeams on the roof give the whole area the feeling of an indoor gymnasium.
You see her coming. She has pulled on a blue suede coat with dangling collar ties and a hood that makes her look like a pixie. Her hair is fastened on one side with a glittery clasp that gave her a girlish look.
A soon as she reaches the table where you sit, you are both arguing. You are so used to this by now that you hardly get upset at all. You hand the keys to the house.
“I’ve packed my gear. I’m going to Nowra.”
She stares at you. “That’s a stupid idea,” she says.
“Come on, you know it doesn’t work any more. I’m not sticking around to be stomped on.“
She looks as though you’ve clubbed a baby fur seal to death. You lean forward to touch lightly the inside of her wrist. Of course you don’t expect such a gesture to mean anything now. She draws away from your touch.
Things are pulling out of shape. You remember the day she first let the front of her blouse be unbuttoned, closing her eyes slightly in anticipation of your touch. Everything since then has gone wrong. However often you kissed her, no matter how tenderly you held her to you, your right hand cradling her head and stroking her soft hair, the death of her own ambition was present. You couldn’t stand that.
You stand up. You leave. You don’t look back to see the expression that is on her ace. She is on her own now. She’s had you and now she doesn’t. Too bad for her.
A day later you are sitting in a cheap motel in Nowra. The cheap brownish carpet is strewn with your clothes.
“Spend long enough in places like this and your spirit will heave itself inside out,” you think. Of course, you’re a bit depressed. It’s only natural. But later you’ll go out and explore some of the coves and little bays which carve the cliff tops open like hunks of sourdough bread, their rough banks dotted with donkey orchids and hybanthus. These
bright blooms will cheer you up. You will push your way past the bushes obscuring the little rough paths, and you will come out into your new life.
Leaving town has been the best thing to do, even if you will always dream of the dim light pooled in the hollows of her collar-bones.
