Wednesday the 15th of September - Day and the Night Before

Prologue to the Day

14/09/2010 – Night

The trend for recent evenings hadn't been broken tonight, she'd kept him up later than he'd have liked. Since knowing her he's found sleep's overrated unless it's by her side and even the sight and sound of her on a cold screen are better than hot dreams of sensual taunting that end, awake and alone in an empty bed.

Guilty people apologise, sorry people apologise constantly. It's an idiosyncratic reflex of his, born from being the butt of blame for years and years past. Not exceptionally so, because all children and teens surely experience this, but it was too easy to learn the wrong lessons from the events and chastisements that surrounded him. It was just unfortunate that the perception required to garner the right lessons from them had developed in him too late. So he became, as he inevitably would, a sorry person.

Demi and Nathan had been sitting on Skype for two hours and still hadn't spoken of anything real, Nathan had been too busy to find out why until he, almost instinctually, apologised for nothings said that couldn't have offended which had been remembered in contexts which hadn't been spoken. He'd asked her not to write of him because he thought her thinking fond thoughts of him so often would wear thin so quickly, and that was the one thing that scared him more than the speed at which he was falling for her. Nathan knew this request was a trespass to anyone who glowed with fires of creation but had asked anyway. Demi told him it wasn't to do with that, it was her fear that had made her quiet. Her fear was the same as his, and when he realised a fear like this freezes her tongue and burdens her heart the same way it does his, he knew what he would say would reassure them both.

Wednesday 15th September 2010

{Sitting on the first train for months}

Nathan rose late this morning, a result of a night spent shamelessly 'Skype-ing' with Demi, in each others distant company on the cyber-plane - in image and sound - until the early hours. He spent the hour between eight and nine a.m. dreading how the tattered state of his French knowledge wouldn't be enough to get him through his nearing exams and wondering how it was he would get back on top of the life he'd let fall apart like badly played game of Jenga. Finally, after deciding for the umpteenth time that nothing but his own actions would save him, he tore himself from his warm, comfortable duvet-wrapped indolence and squinted his eyes to spot the slight variation from the navy green and threadbare brown of his carpet which would be his underwear. Putting those and his Karate bottoms on with a black hoodie, grabbed the empty tea cups from the previous night and pulled open his off-white bedroom door and made for the kitchen. After pacing around the cramped and putridly coloured, linoleum floored cooking space a few times, indecisively opening and shutting cupboard doors, he realised breakfast wasn't worth the trouble yet. He had things to do and for once intended to do them.

He went downstairs and out to the driveway, intending to work out what was wrong with his car. The cause of yesterdays commotion. He was sure it was the temperature gauge or thermostat pump that was playing up, so he put water and fresh coolant into the radiator, left the cap off, started the engine and waited to see if the liquid was pumped through the engine properly. The engine kicked over and did its usual jogging and juddering but then started running more smoothly. The bubbles formed in the coolant sitting around the cap as it should, then as the engine warmed up and needed more liquid to cool, started bubbling over constantly, like a miniature rusty-watered geezer. It seemed consistent though, which wasn't – contrary to how it may sound – a good thing. Nathan said one word, the only word one knows will encompass dismay such a this:
“Fuck.”

He'd have to take it to the pro's... again. A service he couldn't afford but knew he needed.

He took a moment to stare disappointedly at his incapacitated green tin of freedom, then swallowed his pride and walked along the coarsely cobbled driveway into the yellow cask he called home. His father was sitting at his computer desk, fiddling with the buzzer that his own late father – Nathan's Grandfather – had used to call for help when he was too weak and still too proud to use his voice. Mark had cared for his father for three years, since his first stroke, until the end. Two weeks and three days ago.

“What'cha doin' with that?” Nathan asked.

“We need a new doorbell, so I'm recycling this”, replied Mark, with a hint of mock pride. Nathan had heard the buzzer a couple of times over the past few days but hadn't thought anything of it, now he hoped this was why. The thought crossed Nathan's mind that his father had become somehow attached to the sound and worried it might be unhealthy, that it might inhibit his grieving to keep hearing the piercing bi-tonal bleep calling him to anything. Even if it's not to the aid of a slowly departing father. He almost asked him if he wasn't sick of the sound, but decided against it.

“Would I be able to get a lift to the train station in an hour or so?”
Mark looked amused and clicked his tongue patronisingly.

“I thought your car sounded a bit off...”

“I think the thermostat's buggered, it's pumping when it idles, but I drive and it just overheats.”
“Well, yeah, no problem, taking it to the monkeys?”

“Certainly am, lucky me, they'll probably change the fucking wheel again. Morons.”
***

Driving into Morisset used to feel like driving into ground-zero of some decades old disaster, the Chernobyl of the Central Coast, but by most accounts there never was any major catastrophe. Over the last few years it's undergone an overhaul, gained new shops, a golf club and course and moved a certain defining land-mark a little further away.

“It's been a year or two since I've come here, the scenery's changed but the feelings the same.” Mark said, in that vacant tone one only gets when distracted with a task as mundane as driving. It had been two years since they'd come here together, Nathan had noticed the same thing.

“That feeling being there makes the place even less trustworthy. You at least used to be able to see how dodgy it was. Now it's hidden, it's like the town equivalent of a banker, suit and tie covering up its nefarious business dealings.” Nathan hadn't had any real experience with bankers, but he'd heard most were less than respectable characters and liked pretend to know things.

Morisset train station feels like a waiting room at the edge of sanity. Situated a few kilometres from the aforementioned 'defining land-mark' - a mental institution – and judging by the state of the commuters you'd be forgiven for thinking that the crazy's catching. Nathan waited in the platform-side waiting alcove and felt like he was in a gaol prayer room. The bland aesthetic left him trawling his mind for entertainment, but all he found was worry. Forced reflection, again. Dedicated erudition had stopped being his primary vocation recently, as quickly as it had started just a year ago and he hoped the worry didn't show. He hoped he didn't look like one of the stations regulars. He hoped he was, as he'd let himself feel over the past couple of days, getting back on track.

“S'kuze mayte, ya got any durries, bro?” The drawl ripped him from his daydream to a beak, rather than a nose, attached to a red, unshaven face topped by a black and white Adidas hat sweatily leering at him. He took a moment to realise this was in fact a request.

“No, sorry about that.” He wasn't at all. “I don't smoke.” He does.

“No worries, cuz.” The man left, presumably to ask someone else for 'durries'.

Nathan strolled around the waiting room again, admiring the brutalistic ingenuity of the dirty yellow painted cement block of chairs in the centre of the room, topped with a patch of soil which he could only assume was meant for plants but where now only cigarette butts lay.

He heard the trundling wheels and hissing breaks, and when the windows turned silver he took the cue and walked out onto to the platform to meet the train. The man who'd asked for a cigarette strutted excitedly along the platform toward the back of the train, knocking his knuckles against the metal side of the corrugated carriage as it slowed. It was then that Nathan noticed that he had on, to match his black and white Adidas hat, a black and white Adidas tracksuit. The continuity of his outfit was ruined only by the the fluorescent orange neckerchief, which left one only wondering, 'why?'.

Greeted with the usual smell those latrines on rails offered, Nathan walked along the carriage in search of a seat. Choosing one that looked cramped enough for him to look too big to sit next to, he sat down, took his laptop from his bag, turned it on and began to write.

... Wednesday 15th September 2010

{Sitting on the first train for months}

He rose late this morning, a result of a night spent shame...

Thinking back over the day he realised how contradictory the violence with which rigmarole can play itself out is. You can do the same thing countless days over but still gain new insights, feelings and opinions from it, all depending on things as simple as mood or weather. These moments spent writing himself as another were the only places and times he realised it. A million different fates await the same person in the same situations, this was where one could go to escape the fate.

Forty-five minutes later the train pulled into Hamilton station, just as he was beginning to get used to the smell. A changeover and a few more minutes gone and he'd arrived on campus, the rest of the day was to pass in a daze, most favourably in the company of Demi, lying on a small patch of grass that glowed in the midday sun. The rest in sepia hewed snapshots of French dictionaries and the under-edited prose and poems of his some of his less-than-inspired peers.

The sun leaked it's yellow warmth over the day until it turned amber and slowed the traffic of those beneath it. Finally it ran out at half past five, when Nathan watched the spring twilight leave the day at the mercy of the moon and stars from the window of his writing classroom. This is where he found out the days prose and poetry was less than it should have been but more inspired than it seemed, this was where he was surprised to find out Kai's stumbled and esoteric poems weren't as bad as they flowed on first glance, and then nodded along with his tutors analysis until seven p.m came, when he left.

Walking from his Creative Writing class, scouring his mind through a cracked jewellers lens of narrow thought, he uncovered a memory from the days haze that lifted him from his somnambulism. He'd made plans with Demi. Tonight he'd spend enveloped in warm, mutual longing and deep, teaming lust. Tonight they'd find their ends together then search over and over again.