My Short Stint As Me

Enjoy.

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For at least two hours now, my mother has been arguing with Charles Dickens. Dickens, having just completed Great Expectations, and my mother, with a glass of wine in her hand and half her attention given to the television, disagree over whether I’ll be okay. They both make convincing arguments, but mum is older and more experienced, so it stands to reason that she’s probably right. I’m an idiot and totally incapable of making the right decisions.

I wish my father would interject, but he’s playing golf with the Prime Minister and won’t be home until he gets sick of politics.

The train shows up late, and I don’t get on. It seems strange to the people around me that anyone would remain still once the train they had been waiting for arrives. I have no way of telling that they feel this way, but the people I project onto their bodies definitely don’t understand my actions.

The next train takes six minutes, and in that time my mother has been silenced, but only temporarily. Perhaps she’s gone to refill her glass, or she got a phone call from a telemarketer. I get on this train, and without an argument to direct my thoughts, my mind wanders.

“Doors closing,” says a metallic female voice, and I think about what sort of lamp I need, and if there’s anything else I need to buy when I get to IKEA. The pain in my neck reminds me that yes, I need a new pillow. All the pillows in my apartment belonged to Zoe for some reason. Oh, and two new bookends.

Lamp, bookends, pillow. Someone says they’ll remember that.

The man in the business suit on the seat next to me works away on his laptop. He is an internet poet, reciting into the abyss in the hopes that someone will feel him. It’s a shame he isn’t very good. I’d give him some tips, but the poet in me was killed by a novelist some time ago.

The novelist in me remarks that perhaps this trip to IKEA is an excuse to put off writing chapter four. The unreliable narrator in me tells him I really do need a new lamp. Chapter four is just one long conversation anyway, so it doesn’t matter if I leave it for a while. Make James really anxious to talk to the detective. That way he’ll blurt out something he doesn’t mean to.

My mind wanders to Kevin the Monomaniac, who is, most likely, thinking about me too. When I get off the train in the city, after my trip to IKEA, he’ll be looking for me and waiting with his pad of fines. I hope he tracks me down on day, and I hope that’s the day I decide to buy a ticket for the train. It’ll break his tiny uniformed heart. If he gets me today, he’ll have fulfilled his purpose in life, as I don’t have a ticket. I never buy tickets. The same creativity involved in fooling transit guards is the same kind it takes to write a novel. Invent a character that has an excuse for not having a ticket – create a universe where you don’t need a ticket.

Zoe was masterful at ticket dodging. As a collaborative work it’s much easier. I remember one night we had dinner in Fremantle, al fresco with tiny lights strung about the trees, and afterwards caught the train back to my apartment in the city. She wore this red dress that I still use to picture her in my mind. She flickers in and out of my mind in that dress, complaining about the cold and laughing at my joke about a man with a big orange head.

The thing about the Fremantle line is that they don’t check tickets when you enter and exit the station, and instead the guards are on the train, wandering the aisle and searching for ticket dodgers. It was about 11 o’clock when we got on, hoping to be asked for the tickets we didn’t have. We had it well-rehearsed, there was no way we were going to fail. It was just after the Cottesloe station that a large man in a blue uniform approached us.

“Tickets please,” he said to everyone around us, and everyone started reaching for them. Eventually he addressed us directly, repeating his previous statement.

“Show him the tickets, honey,” I said to Zoe.

“I don’t have them, you do,” she retorted.

“I’m pretty sure I gave them to you. Just have a look through that pretty little purse of yours and you’ll see them.” It was integral to the plan that I act like a complete prick to her.

“No, because I remember saying to you that you better not lose them.”

“Right, so I said to you that it would be easier if you just kept them in your purse. Just have a look.”

So she rummaged around in her bag, looking extremely vexed.

“They aren’t in here,” she said to me.

“Sorry,” I said to the transit guard. “It’ll just take a few seconds for her to find them. You know what it’s like in those bags.”

“God, you’re such a bastard. Why are you always doing this? You always act like everything’s my fault, even when it’s obviously yours.”

“It’s because you always fuck up the simplest of things. You couldn’t even hold onto a couple of train tickets, for fuck’s sake.”

It turns out our timing was perfect, because just as the argument was reaching its climax the train started slowing down for the next station.

“You know sometimes I think my mother was right about you. You really are a cretin!”

“Oh, come one…”

The train pulled to a stop at West Leederville and just as it did Zoe stood up to storm off the train. As she crossed onto the platform, she turned and yelled at me. “Your brother makes me happier than you ever could!” She walked down the platform, leaving me with the guard.

I gave him a look as if to say, “I’m sorry about the tickets, but I really have to go after her,” and I think he understood. I narrowly avoided the closing doors and went after her down the platform. She was on a bench, head in her hands and pretending to cry, just in case the guard was still watching. When it pulled away she stood up and kissed me.

“How was I?” she asked.

“You were electric. Especially that part about my brother, that was a nice touch.”

“Yeah, I was going to tell you about that in rehearsal, but I wanted to surprise you.”

“I was definitely surprised, and so was the guard. Did you see his face?”

“No, Amanda wasn’t interested in his face.”

“Amanda?”

“I gave my character a name, I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all. In fact I was thinking mine would be named Tony. I don’t know why.”

“You know sometimes I think it would be easier to just buy tickets.”

“It would, but where’s the fun in that?”

“I guess.”

It really would be easier, but we never took the easy option. So now Dickens is saying something to my mother, who has fallen asleep, about my inability to communicate properly, and Zoe is in Melbourne making lists of things to buy. Tom Waits sings something unintelligible into my ear, despite me leaving my iPod at home, and I realize that I’m more afraid than sad.

I’m not afraid of being alone so much as I’m afraid of how I’ll probably deal with it. It’s started already. The last thing she said was, “Write me, please.” And so I will, although I’m not sure how I’m going to end it. In all probability there’ll be an anti-climax like a narrowly missed bus.

From the window of the train, IKEA appears like a blue and yellow bastion of convenience. I get off and follow the other people that obviously have the same destination as me. As a fractured and estranged garrison, we storm the front door and go about claiming the spoils of victory. I get lost immediately, but that is the point.

Lamps are everywhere, but they’re so well-placed in those little dioramas of domesticity that when I see one I like I feel like I could never give it such a good home. In my apartment it’d be placed on a desk cluttered with paper and empty bottles. Would it be an insult to this tableau if I were to use this lamp’s light when I’m watching porn on my computer? Should I also buy the desk they have it placed on? Get some ornaments to place on it? Live a cleaner life? Maybe I’d be better off getting a new apartment, with rooms exactly the size of each of these little constructions, and starting from pre-packaged scratch. Taking this lamp to my place would be like inviting the Brady Bunch to an orgy. So I look for another one – one that isn’t implanted in the living room of a wholesome family that doesn’t exist.

I eventually find one, standing amongst distant relations. It looks disaffected, so I take a note of which one it is to pick up at the warehouse downstairs. (Is it downstairs? I have no idea where I am.)

I find a white pillow and some brown bookends that look like they should be holding back books by Kierkegaard.

They’ll be disappointed when one ends up next to Edward Gorey and the other next to the Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary. Such a shame.

Kierkegaard likes the look of them.

In the hedgemaze warehouse I ask someone where I can find the lamp I am looking for. They point in the direction I came at them from. I turn and walk away. I ask someone else, and they say something I don’t hear. Rather than admit that I didn’t hear them, I turn and walk away. I decide that there must be some sort of order down here, and that the lamps must all be somewhere together, like children in an orphanage.

Later I find myself back at the train station, with a lamp in a box, in a bag with my pillow and the bookends. The act of shopping was not an intellectual process; it was more like a plane crashlanding in a field. It is unclear at which point I lost control and started making deals with God, but I hit solid ground eventually. Now, amongst my consumerist debris, I decide that I will buy a ticket, and search for Kevin when I get to the city. I am feeling spiteful.

A few coins later and I am holding legitimacy in my hand. I hope Kevin is working today. The train arrives on time, and I get on. Normally I use the transit system as my office, my studio, my reflecting pool. Tolstoy used to write in the town square of whatever town it was that he lived in (I really should look that up), but Murray Street Mall is not conducive to creativity. I’m not sure why, but trains, and to a lesser extent buses, are. I’ll explain it to myself one day.

Three largely unthinking stops later I am back in the city, searching to break the heart of a transit guard the likes of which the world had not seen since Ahab. Carrying my bag full of the wonders of capitalism, I stroll up the stairs and look toward the gates. There he is, a picture of obsession’s victory over vigilance. Terrorists, escaped zoo animals, Hitler, orcs, any of these could wander past him to enter the station, as long as they bore absolutely no resemblance to me. It seems a slight overreaction, considering he’s only narrowly avoided catching me without a ticket five times.

I walk straight at him, smiling widely. He does the same, smiling wider. “Can I see your ticket, please?” he asks, reaching for his fines book.

“There you go,” I say, showing him the piece of paper that is sure to give him a stroke.

He doesn’t say a word, but I can tell he’s screaming every obscenity he knows at me in his head. If the rage can block the flow of blood, I shall dial for an ambulance myself. “Anything else?” I say to him.

He still says nothing, so I continue past him. Once I reach the escalator, I watch him for as long as I can on the way up. He returns my gaze eventually, and I feel like I want to go home and write chapter four with a lot of coarse language in it. Or perhaps I’ll rename the detective Kevin.