Martin Edmond


The Lost Ones

Then the strangers, the lost ones, began to come out towards me. Steve, whose mind was inhabited by phantoms; Matt, who believed the Mayan Long Count will conclude (and with it all time) in the year 2013. Barry, tracking down the man who gave the streets of Athanor their bizarre names to ask him what they meant. Peter, uttering that unmentionable, suicide ... who was I if not one of these?

+ + +

Steve came and sat beside me on the train. He was about sixteen. On his way into the city with his mother to see a therapist. She was sitting at the back of the carriage. He kept twisting round in his seat to look at her. The rest of the time he re-played an archetypal, vestigial drama over and over in his mind: The dingo chases the red kangaroo? The red kangaroo kicks the dingo? The gunman shoots the red kangaroo? The policeman hunts the gunman? The dingo bites the policeman? The grey kangaroo ... If I agreed with these statements that were also questions, he would wander on down that line of thought for a while. But if I doubted him, even for a moment, a breath, he would shake his head violently and begin again. In between times he stroked his hair, which was bristly from being newly cut short. After a while he smiled sweetly and said: Thanks for talking to me. Not long before the train came in the station, he came back and introduced himself and we shook hands.

+ + +

Matt was on the bus. When he realised we were from the same country, he told the story of how he came to be here. He was just passing through, on his way up to Asia. He booked in at the People's Palace and, next morning, went downstairs and across the road to a newsagent to buy a paper. There was nobody in the shop except the Italian who served him. He paid and left, scanning the news of this unfamiliar place. It wasn't until he was out on the street again that he realised he had left his wallet behind on the counter. He went straight back in and asked for it. The Italian shrugged. Wallet? What wallet? There was no wallet. Matt stared at the man who had just robbed him of five hundred dollars and his air ticket, and understood there was nothing he could do. There were no witnesses. It was his word against the Italian's. He did not argue, or plead, or threaten to call the police. He turned and left the shop. That was fourteen years ago, and he was still here. How is it? I asked. O.K., he said.

+ + +

Barry was a handsome, disappointed man who would not look me in the eye. At the art opening, he stood near the door, in front of a plastic doll with a glass eye glued between her legs, and described how he had tracked down the man who named the streets of Athanor. He was living in the back of a ute up north somewhere. He was very bitter. He would say nothing about the names. Work it out for yourself, he snarled. Actually there were two of them, a man and woman. The man gave the names, the woman planted trees, called the birds back down to the sea, made snake magic on dappled afternoons on the Bora Ground. They were the Adam and Eve of Athanor, except their names were Minnie and Jack. They were both farmers. Jack lived on one side of the valley and Minnie on the other. This went on for years. Then they had a falling out, and Jack left. For the rest of his life he wandered, dying not long after Barry tracked him down and received from him as a gift his restlessness, his bitterness, his anger. As for Minnie, there's a book about her. Where are you going now? I asked Barry, who’d long since left Athanor but was not settled anywhere else. He didn't know. Where is there to go? he said. There's nowhere.

+ + +

This was at Peter's opening. Peter, surrealist of the littoral, who otherwise paints with the translucent, swirling, glimmering stuff of the sea, invents new creatures out of tide wrack, and composes the place of beautiful stones, was showing pictures of sexual obsession made from junk shop kitsch. He was talking about suicide: It's O.K. to have these negative feelings, he said, everybody does, and it's better to admit than deny them. Maybe it's only a part of yourself you don't like, not your whole personality. A pity to destroy everything for the sake of a few bad characteristics … In other words, suicide as a desire for change, not oblivion. This was of course also the secret of the names of Athanor. The desire for change I mean.

+ + +

So. I was one of these: an accident of fate, unwilling, unwilled, tossed up on a foreign shore to make what I could. In my head, a set of nouns and verbs that endlessly combine and recombine as if they had a hidden order which, once arrived at, would tell me who I was. Stumbling among the names of things, names that meant nothing because the primary function of naming, which is to establish a community, a shared map, was denied in the autistic use I made of them. And yet, rather than oblivion, it was transformation I desired. This, then, was what I was. Stranded. Lost. Alone. But changing. Changing.

 
 
 
previous page     contents     next page