Monday, 21 January 2019

On the hill, in the night.




This is a piece of a manuscript I have completed, the piece that I began with and that makes the easiest sense to me.





The blued world is silent outside the windows of the truck, the air itself made whole with the weight of the cold that has come as they slept; growing steadily into these early hours. Andy is trying to concentrate on the simple piece of paper in his hand and yet his eyes are drawn back to the windscreen over and again, the huge tracts of starlight rendering the world utterly beyond the need for sound. His eyes take so long to focus these days, especially after the rush to wakefulness with the shrill call of the bells, the glaring lights of the station rousing itself to action. They know the stretch of road so well from nights before when cars have rushed through the emptiness that Andy has time, lets his eyes wander.
The sleek truck cuts easily through the streets so that they too seem soundless. Andy hunches down a little in the passenger seat, cradling the pool of soft yellow light that comes from above his head with the reading light on and picks out the scant information of the printout that guides them to the car wreck somewhere ahead where the houses run out and the road climbs into the hills.
He looks over to the blurred shape of Ben, the gentle points of light from the dashboard instruments rise to his impassive face, get caught in the crazy spikes of hair that betray the depth of his recent sleep, and run out in strange fingers of shadow on the roof of the truck’s cabin.
They are there soon, Andy leans forwards and takes a big breath, leans back hard into the seat and pushes his boots into the footwell, opening his eyes wide and willing himself fully awake. The truck turns at the bare crest of the hill where the roads meet, roaring to pick up speed and then running fast down the slope beyond as the empty expanse of the long snaking coastal road beckons them down. A woman stands and waves her arm high above her head as the headlights of the truck sweep around to pick her out, she is up on tip-toe with her eyes wide and staring as she stands in the haven of the passenger door of her car. As their lights bears down she runs a hand through her hair, tugs at her blouse straightening the collar. The headlights of her car run lines through the low, broken bush just far enough to pick out the dulled red shape that seems to be hiding, ostrich like, in the low bush beyond.
Andy gets out, as he is stepping down the cold engulfs him, and he moves quickly as much to bring some warmth as to begin the things that must be done now. The two men come together in front of the truck and cross the gravelly verge. Ben reaches the woman first where she has stepped gingerly up to the top of a small embankment. She points incredulously, impotently, towards the car down through the broken stumps of scrubby bush and clumps of raised soil, “there are a man and a woman in there, I didn’t know what to do…. I heard you, I thought you might go past”.
Ben thanks her, tells her she is doing a great job, her arm is still stretched out in front of her, pointing, and he takes her elbow and turns her a little, back towards the road and her silent car. “Others are coming now, the ambulance and the police, can you go back and make sure they see us too?”
Andy will be the one to decide what is to be done and he has stepped beyond the other two, towards the car, taking a breath and stilling his mind, running through the checklists he creates each time so that he will not miss anything. He has a torch in his hand and tentatively picks his way across the ground, the trail of small pieces of metal and rubber and glass catching the beam of the torch and he begins to hear the ticking of cooling metal.
In an instant everything is thrown into harsh light, and the torn ground before him becomes a patchwork of glowing orange and impenetrable black. Tufts of long grass stand at crazy angles in verdant green. Ben has put up the light towers on the roof of the truck and there will be no need of the torch. Andy tenses a little as he always seems to now in the light and looks back towards the truck with silly memories of war movies he loved as a boy with prisoners running away from spotlights, and something much more, a feeling that now there is no hiding, that everything will be seen until the lights go down again.
He turns and sets out quickly towards the car and he can see the face of a woman in the passenger seat, she follows his approach intently in the wing mirror of her closed door, her eyes fighting the pin points of glare the truck’s lights make, refusing to blink, refusing to let go until he is with her.
Andy reaches the door and her open window, the glass scattered about announces him and she looks up into his face as he bends down and places his hand on her arm.
“Hi, I’m Andy”, he says, running his eyes down the length of her narrow body and then across the car to the man slumped in the driver’s seat and finally over to the back seat, empty. “Just the two of you?”
“Yes”, she says, her voice is clear and very deep, her eyes widen further as she speaks and he knows that it has not had this depth before. Her eyes seem to run over him in waves, and he exhales slowly so that he might recapture a little of the peace the silence and the stars have brought so recently. In that moment he feels her arm relax a little, sees her chest rise and fall, and he has done what he wanted to, and can begin.
He stands up straight, away from the window for a moment and takes a long breath, soaking up the cold and the darkness and the silence now as the adrenalin begins and he is hot and fidgety, and then he hears Ben’s voice coming from the other side of the car. Bending down he sees the bright lights behind them and the depth of shadow thrown by the broken trees painting Ben’s face in stripes as he looks across the cabin of the car to meet Andy’s eye.
Andy smells the fuel that runs away unseen, the perfume and the aftershave, the blood, the soil and the bush.
The car leans drunkenly towards the man and Ben has to crouch down to the window on his side, the door he rests his gloved hand on is a mess of shapes and smeared with soil, and the steering wheel is bent all out of shape sitting down hard in the man’s lap. Andy cannot see the man’s leg, or his arm lost in the mess of the broken innards of the door. He has seen this set of a man’s body many times, the way he closes his eyes and measures his breath before he will open them and meet Andy’s eyes, or those of his wife.
It was just before 1am when they left the station and the ballet programme rests in the lap of the woman still, the beautiful sweep of the arm of the ballerina is matched by the arc of dark red that flows across the cover from the bottom edge of the glossy paper. She has raised her hand tentatively to her face, dabbed gently at the edges and retreated, not wanting to think of what that slow throbbing pain and warmth might mean and placing her hand deliberately back in her lap.
The radio is playing, the blue lights of the stereo dull and slightly askew in the dash. The music remains whole, bubbly and oblivious and Ben reaches across the man’s chest and switches the sound off.
The warmth of the air conditioning is waning and Andy feels it escape through the space of the broken window, feels how quickly the cold returns, seeming to rise out of the ground and desperately claw at the car now that it stands so still and quiet.
He reaches into one of the many pockets of his over-trousers and takes a sterile pad. Opening the package below the line of the window and keeping the pad cradled and hidden in the pit of his palm he places his gloved hand gently at the woman’s temple in one unhurried movement. The man eyes are locked upon Andy in that moment, and Andy knows the thoughts those huge eyes hold.
The man’s unblinking eyes will Andy to take the pain from her, if he could take it all for himself he would. Andy can see how the man’s body tenses and feels what it means for him to be held, entrapped in this crazy mess, away from her, away from helping her now.
He knows the clear, gentle strength that the man’s voice would hold for her, anywhere but here, now. He is about Andy’s age and their bodies match in size. Andy hears his own voice then, and it holds all that strength, and gentleness, and the couple look to each other, as if the man himself has spoken.
Andy knows them, this man and woman. He has been him, in fragments, and has allowed women to be her for him, in fragments.
Very quickly Andy opens the door, using his weight to push it forward unnaturally and then tie it to the bumper using one of the short ropes he always has in his uniform pockets. The woman seems tiny in the open space and incongruous in her gown, sitting with the seatbelt still fastened, raised off the ground with the buckling of the car.
Andy puts his hand back to her temple as if this is the most natural thing to do and with the other reaches across and undoes the seatbelt. He takes the programme from the woman’s lap and puts it down on the floor next to her small feet, and then as if to ask the woman to dance he holds his hand out, palm up. She looks to her husband then, and she does not want to go. The man smiles gently, looking at her and then moving his eyes deliberately to Andy and she follows his eyes, takes Andy’s hand and steps down gingerly to the broken earth beneath. And in that moment she is gone, the ambos and their blanket swallowing her up, leading her away so that the huge rounded shadow of them all close together passes over the car. Andy moves quickly, getting in at the passenger side so that he is close to the man now, and to Ben, their three heads almost touching as he and Ben follow the light of their torches down the length of the man searching for what it is that holds him here, makes his breathing shallow.
The second truck from their station has arrived, the slower, lumbering ‘pump’, full of water, bringing the men who do all the little things around them at these jobs, stabilising, lugging equipment back and forth, taking the mess away, things Andy has shown them over and over. They run hose from the truck and come back quickly carrying the tools they will use to dismantle the car, the stretcher, the blankets they will need when the man comes out at last.
Sam comes quickly and quietly to the space behind Andy at the passenger door and begins to place stabilising blocks beneath the car. Andy turns and gets out of the car, placing a hand on Sam’s shoulder as he passes, “Good, good, we’ll get the gear dump at the boot, where we can see it all Sam.”  Andy goes back around the car, and the boss meets him as he passes, “We’ll take the roof off”, Andy says, “and then we’ll see”.
Sam and the others bring the gear, start the pump to power the tools, set up lights to take away the final shadows, and the ambo’s use the space Andy has created to be with the man, their lines of fluids running from the bonnet of the car, the monitors beeping in indecipherable sounds and flashing colours.
It is hard work they rush into, their breath beginning to billow about the men as they move back and forth, back and forth, bringing the heavy things they need. Andy and Ben break the glass of the windows, cut through the heavy, crazily scored remains of the windscreen and they are ready to take the roof off.
Andy make his cuts quickly, the hydraulics pushing blades easily through metal, so that soon the weight of the roof is in the hands of the men spread around the car and they walk it away forwards, into the bush. The ambo’s spread more comfortably around the man then, and look to Andy, something in the beeping of the machines and the way his arm disappears into the innards of the door tells them he needs to be out soon. They run more fluids into the man, more lines, but he doesn’t talk to them as he did and urgency is all around Andy and Ben now.
They take pieces of the door one after the other. Sweat envelops them beneath the heavy uniforms. As if surgeons they turn to Sam and he gives and takes pieces of equipment as they need them, each piece of the car feels heavier in Andy’s hands as he works at the door.
They are done at last and the arm is free but it is not an arm anymore and the ambo’s do what they can, clustering around the space at the driver’s door with bandages and pads they rip from the large gear bags lying across the back seat and tossing the plastic wrappings away. Still the man is not free, and the insistent beeping of the machines seems to own the space now, stridently mocking them all.
Andy is sweating so heavily that he must take off his gloves as they slop about his hands, he half turns and shakes each in turn into the freezing cold of the air outside the small space left between the legs of the man and the crumpled footwell of the car. The orange earth has burst in as they took the door off and Andy has to dig it out, scooping it back under his body like a dog at the beach. He can see nothing it is so dark and there is Ben, knowing his thoughts, knowing this crazy, terrible thing they do together so well. Ben’s torch touches the shoulder of Andy’s tunic and lights the space. Andy looks up to see Sam on the far side of the car, sweat and dirt in lines on his face, tugging the long cable of the light that he sits on the sill of the open doorway so that light spills down to the feet of the man.
One of the ambo’s leans down into the space from the back seat and says quietly “We’ve got to go”, Andy looks again at the mess around the man’s feet and knows that there is no time for this to be what they had hoped as they began. He feels Ben and Sam quicken around him, knowing this just as he does.
Andy places his hand gently on the man’s ankle, where it seems to disappear behind the bend of the brake pedal, and in that moment the man puts his one good hand on Andy’s shoulder, and squeezes hard. Andy feels so much strength, and he can feel that something so whole can still come to an end, that there is nothing that will change that. He looks up as best he can, and the man is looking straight at him, to the very depth of everything that no one has ever seen. There is nothing in the man’s eyes other than an understanding. Andy turns back to his work, he must, and they have said all that they need to.
The feet of the man are there, but they face in directions they should not. They are stylish shoes, the sort Andy would ask the man about in a different world. They are a beautiful deep brown, but now this has become a deep red and the floor carpet mimics the shoes. The pedals the man’s feet worked so recently have become misshapen and entangle the cuffs of the man’s trousers.
Andy says without turning, quietly as Ben is so close, “I just need my knife”. And Ben knows exactly where the knife is, raises Andy’s tunic at the back and takes the silver knife from its sheath on the belt of his sodden trousers, opens the blade and passes it into Andy’s waiting hand. When he cuts the grey material and it tears away from the dark, bent metal, the weight of the man’s body takes him back into the seat they have lain down and he is free, yet the shoes remain exactly as they had been. As he rises and brings the man’s legs out of the space with him Andy realises the man is still looking at him, and he can hear the gentleness and the strength again. The man simply holds his gaze for a long moment and then closes his eyes.
There is a rush of movement and they have the man out of the car, onto the board waiting, and together the firies and ambo’s carry him quickly away over the rough ground, ambo’s holding the lines and the bags of fluid high, stumbling, bodies coming together, until finally they are over the embankment, onto the gravel and out into the road.
The ambulance is gone just like that, rising silently to the crest of the road so that its red and blue lights mingle for a moment with the stars pouring down, and then there is nothing. Andy stands facing up the hill. He is so tired that with his hands thrust into the pockets of his tunic his shoulders slump towards each other and he takes a step forwards to catch himself. It is so cold now they have finished, his saturated shirt sticking to his back, sweat pooling at his neck so that he fixes his tunic collar high and pushes his chin down into it.
There is a strange feeling of anticlimax. After so much noise and furious action.
It is often this way for Andy now. As if the performance began to a packed auditorium, and then as they reached the climax the audience discovered this was not the ending they wanted, these were not the things they wanted the actors to say and do. One last chaotic crescendo and everyone heading loudly for the exits, and then the lights were turned out, and there was only an empty silence.
He pushes his hands further down into the depth of the big pockets of his tunic and turns a little towards Ben, standing just as he, a little further over, a little further up the hill. They are completely alone, the other men busy already with the process of packing up all the gear they have used, rolling the heavy hoses back up the hill to the truck, wiping the dark earth from everything. The boss talks with the police somewhere behind them, his voice disembodied in the dark as the deep silence steals back over the crest of the hill knowing it will own this space again soon.
“I knew those people Ben.”
Ben turned to Andy, his eyes huge and hurting, a deep crease shadowing his forehead as he ran a hand roughly back over his head, slicking down his sodden hair. “What? Who are they?”
“I don’t mean like that. I mean there was something there, between us. He knew me, knew all about me, before he went. So did she.
That was what made it so hard for her to leave him with us.
She didn’t know how bad he was, we managed to hide that well, like we always do. She knew all the bad that there has ever been in me though. That’s never happened before. Anyone who can see all those things is going to wonder how I can ever do this, how it can be me sent to help them.”
“You did help them, no one could have helped them more.”
“I know that’s true. But that’s not the point.
The point is all the pain I’ve ever heaped on others was right there and I couldn’t hide any of it. Somehow they knew all those things, all that weakness, all the weakness in me still.
He told me that I can’t keep tearing everything else to pieces anymore, that all those things are not made alright by this work we do.”
“Don’t say that. We finish in the morning Andy, we don’t have to do this for a week at least. This will just be the last one we did by the time we come back to work, and you’ll wonder what made you think so much of it.”
“It is just the last one we did. But it’s the one that has been coming for a long time, and I can’t ignore it like I have so many other things.”
Ben looked back towards the other men, down the hill, beavering away towards getting back to the warmth of the station, a shower. He stomped each foot in turn in his big, dirty boots, anyone happening to see would have thought the cold trickling over the hill had crept up his legs unseen. Andy saw the way Ben shook his head, and then again quickly, little movements as if he shooed something away.
“Don’t say those things Andy. This is what we do. You are great at this. What more could you have done? This isn’t about anything other than you thinking that guy should be alive.”
“He was always going to die Ben, that’s not the point. He gave me more than I have to give anyone. I owe it to him to listen to the things he said.”
“He didn’t say a freakin word Andy!”
“You heard him Ben, I know you did. When we were there at the end, and he touched me on the shoulder, who was helping who then? I looked at that woman, at the complete trust she had in him, and she became my wife, and how I ran away from everything until she couldn’t trust me. He had so much to give even then, he put me to shame.”
Ben turned back sharply towards Andy, the hurt in his eyes imploring the older man to listen and stop this.
“He was just letting you know it was okay, that he knew it was coming and there was nothing he could do.”
“No, he held on so tight because he didn’t trust I had the strength to admit to the things he was telling me he knew.”
“That’s insane, he wasn’t saying anything.” Ben hissed these last words, sure the men down the hill could hear this craziness. He moved away as he spoke, down the hill, past the boss and over the embankment, joining the others as they went out towards the car again.
Andy watched him go and followed very slowly, hands still in his pockets. He passed behind the boss. Bob turned and looked at Andy as he went. “We’ll have a chat when the guys have all the gear back Andy, just a quick one and then we’ll get out of the cold.”
“Great”, Andy replied, without stopping. He climbed the small embankment and looked down to the car, and then far beyond to the line of street lights that marked the quiet coast and its sleeping homes. He imagined beds and warmth, sleepers seeking each other. He thought of the couple, how close they had come to reaching that warmth, sanctuary. How the man would have been there for her, his long strong legs accepting those delicate cold feet.
He smiled at each man in turn as they came towards him. They weaved about with the fatigue and the lights in their faces and the uneven ground. They bumped together with him lightly as each in turn passed over the embankment and he would slap their backs and murmur words of thanks.
There was nothing much left with the car when he got back to it. He picked up a couple of the blocks that Sam had used and circled around the bonnet, letting his torch beam play slowly, searching for little things forgotten and dropped. These scenes always seemed so surreal when they were done. As if they existed only for this time, a door opened to something which would never exist again. He could imagine his torch beam startling a huge beast lurking under the grille, a ghoul eyeing him from the sentinel bush.
And he burst into tears, stunning, huge tears. He stood with his back to the car as he heaved with the release of pain he had stored and forgotten as he looked out into the depth of the night.
The tears slowed in time. He was so messy, dried sweat and dirt and oil on his face already, that he didn’t even bother to wipe his face.
He finished his slow circuit and looked back towards the lights of the trucks, saw that the others had grouped at the rear of the pump. The lights on the rescue went down and his torch swung slowly from its hook on his tunic to pick out his careful steps on the way back to join them.
As Andy came up to the quiet group he saw that Ben had positioned himself as far away as possible, directly opposite where Andy now joined the rough circle.
The boss took a moment, looked to Andy and then began. “Good job guys, a hard one. But we did a good job I think, you agree Andy?”
Andy looked across to Ben, saw him tense a little, unsure of the answer that Andy would give and not wanting to hear again the words they had shared up the hill.
“Everyone here can be proud of what we did. I always think that.” Andy hadn’t looked away from Ben, and he saw the younger man visibly relax, move a little, shuffle his feet around. “That doesn’t mean this is easy, that maybe one day you won’t start to wonder what it has left for you to give in other ways when you’re done with this.”
Andy stopped then, looked around the circle and watched his words as they crossed each face in turn. Ben had turned away, intent on picking out one of those houses dark down on the coast, and the boss broke the silence. “Anyone want to say anything more?” He stepped forward imperceptibly as he said it and the others moved a little here and there, and shook their heads quietly.
“Good, let’s get out of the cold, we can talk more back at the station.” He looked at Andy as he said this and they held each other’s eyes. They had been friends so many years, had been here so many times. Andy did not want to ever let this man down.
The men walked quickly away and climbed to their seats in the pump, the heavy truck lumbering around in a wide arc, straining to the rise of the hill, and then it was gone.
Ben moved around the rescue and Andy heard the driver’s door close. He stood a moment and then slowly moved over and climbed up to the passenger seat, closing the door as he shimmied around getting comfortable.
Ben drove quickly on the way back, slicing back down the familiar streets so that they were soon close up behind the pump as its swaying shape neared the station. They backed the trucks in and the men fell to the task of cleaning and replenishing and replacing, so that soon the trucks were exactly as they had been when those bells had called them in the night. There was never much talk at such times, the men were tired and sore so that they kept going until all was as it should be, and then they raced to the showers, tearing off layers of saturated clothing and revelling in the warmth.
Andy moved slowly, deliberately, and when he finally crossed the engine bay the showers were silent, puddled footprints the only remnants of the men come and gone. He took his time in the warm water and in the selection of the clothes he put on in front of his locker once dry. Finally he climbed the stairs towards the rooms above.
Normally he would simply moved quietly down the hallway to the bedroom that had been his private space for years now, place his clothes over the back of the office chair neatly so that he was ready for whatever came next, face his boots to the door, and quietly climb back into the single bed.
But there was nothing normal about this night and instead as he reached the top of the stairs he passed through the open doorway into the kitchen, the shadowed mess room with its long dining table beyond. He stood at the empty bench and made himself a strong coffee knowing that he would not sleep, wouldn’t even try. The building was old enough that the windows were beautiful in their size and wooden joinery and the tall expanse of the kitchen window reflected the empty room back to him from its four large panels. He saw his long frame there in the corner of each pane of glass, tiny in the simplicity of his dark blue t-shirt and trousers, socks on his feet.
He took his coffee over to the long table and sat half way down on one side, facing back across the room towards the light of the kitchen so that he didn’t have to turn on the bright neon above his head, looking towards the open door to the hallway beyond as he took up the newspaper. The building was deathly quiet and Andy turned the pages quietly, knowing how deep sleep can be after something such as what they had just done.
The paper was the broadsheet Herald that Andy brought from home to catcalls about having tickets on himself. The tabloid alternative sat at the head of the table as always, dog-eared where men had passed by, flicking through the pages until they found a headline that would spark the next debate over football or mortgages, politicians or celebrities.
He carefully divided the paper into its many sections and found himself drawn to the Travel section which he placed on top of the pile and opened. He had no holidays planned. The words held him for a time, he read of a train in the Canadian mountains and a backpacker misadventure in Cambodia. His attention wandered half way through each article so that he had to stop and come back to them after a time, and finally decided he wasn’t really that interested to begin with. He brought the business section to the top of the pile, turning pages absently. He reached for his coffee and realised it was stone cold, it surprised him, and he looked across to the winking lights of the clock on the microwave high up amongst the kitchen shelves and realised how long he had already been sitting there.
He got up and went to the sink, pouring the foamy liquid away and then slowly making another.
When he sat down he leaned back into the straight back chair and scooted down a little to get comfortable; cradling the warm cup. The paper held no interest and as he put down the cup after a couple of long draws on the hot coffee he reached down to his belt and took out the knife that he has used so recently, thinking to check if the blade may need a sharpen soon.
He rolled the knife in his hands, enjoying the weight and solid strength. As he turned the knife more slowly he picked out each of the marks that he had come to know so well over the years, the silver body becoming scarred and scuffed seemingly in time to the course of his career.
Whenever as now he held the knife up longways in his hand the narrow body showed a large chunk out at the top left-hand edge, and Andy had always thought of that mark as the real starting point of his time as a fireman.
 The knife was expensive when he bought it for himself as an acknowledgement of how much it meant, graduating as a firefighter. He had been tentative to use it at first, and the knife had remained clean and shiny new, as he searched for a feeling of belonging in this work.
After perhaps a year or more Andy had been on day shift. It was one of the first shifts where he had been one of two men alone on the Rescue, and in the coming evening they found themselves rushing to save a life as it ebbed away in the tangle of a car rolled upside down against a shattered fence.
Andy still used the same main road to get to work now and sometimes, especially when he had the windows down and traffic moved slowly, he could smell the takeaway curry the man had been covered in, hear the voices of the crowd lined along the footpath as people came out of their homes. He had to get in under the man to cut away bent metal and plastic and he used the knife to cut the seat belt at the last, the man’s heavy body coming down on top of him and hands immediately taking the weight away. He had been incredulous that such a thing was done and then devastated when he learned that it had all been in vain. When he had returned to the station and sat very much as he did now, he had noticed the mark, the first blemish, the chunk missing and the metal raw with the jagged scar. He couldn’t remember what had made the mark or when exactly in all that manic effort.
Shifts passed and he worked at any number of jobs that were almost the same, but somehow they didn’t stay with him as that first job did, and he used the knife over and over and yet that single long gouge remained the only blemish, darkening and softening with age.
He had begun to think then that somehow the knife described what mattered and what did not.
Some jobs came and would stay with him, sometimes the job itself, the scale of what had been asked of him.
More often the people, the children in backseats. The men beneath trains. Each time that he sat afterwards and wondered at what he had done, perhaps began to question doing it again, the knife would be in his hands, and there would be a new mark of some kind. The kind that became the fabric of the knife as the jobs became the fabric of him.
As he grew in the job Andy found it was the sadness. He thought often how strange that would sound said out loud, the sadness, wasn’t it all so sad? But not the sadness that comes in moments, the moments that could go either way, the car veers off the road in the night and takes the man, or the car straightens and they are home dreaming of the ballet.
The sadness that comes with silence and anger, and guilt, building over years until they can be all the things that make up a life. One mark on the knife was a stop/go man run down on the side of a busy road, nowhere near as old as he looked. The only thing the other workers knew of him was he hadn’t been long out of jail. No one was coming for him, there was no one to call. He was often the face Andy saw in the early hours. The man’s mobile had rung in one of his forgotten pockets as they waited for the coroner and Andy had answered it, hoping for a friend, a sister. A crazy hope when he thought later of the news he would have to give them. It was a debt collector. The man looked as if he had had nothing. And now he had nothing. And still someone was looking to take more.
Concern for welfare calls were hard. He would force open the front door to the unmistakeable smell that spoke of how there had been no concern, for too long.
He always ached to know what had brought people to those final places, ached to know what he could learn from such sadness and pass on.
And then he had to look at himself, alone, mirrored in the empty darkness thrown back from the kitchen window, and think of where the end would find him.
With the years the knife was crazed and scored everywhere to the untrained eye, and yet tonight as any night Andy could make out the dozen marks that made up the times that would not leave him, that woke him sometimes. He knew now he had used these things as a crutch, the get-out-of-jail-free cards to justify the things he wished he could erase.
There was a new mark, as he had known there would be. The clean swathe ran in a straight line from the top edge to the bottom and carried on beneath, arcing away. Looking at how the deep gouge shone at its edges, emphasising the darkness at its depths, it seemed to emphatically sign things off.  As a young boy in school he had been taught to rule a line across the page of his textbooks once he had finished each major task, and this seemed to be the same thing. The deep groove seemed to mark an end point.
Andy had imagined this moment sometimes, thinking he would feel the fear that he had seen in the eyes of Ben when they had spoken on the hill. Seen in the eyes of so many men when he thought of years past.
He was frightened, but not of the things that Ben had seen.
It was confronting to think of being invisible. Of giving away the one thing that seemed to define him for others without knowing if there would ever be anything to take its place.
But it was far more frightening to think of what it was the man had seen and understood. How much of a veneer the work had been for him, how much he had used it to not think about the pain he had caused. He had left a marriage behind. He had left a little girl behind. Men had asked him for help and he had not seen it. He had always hated selfishness and now he saw exactly how selfish he had been.
He found himself crying again now, not as he had out there in the dark, these were different tears, they came from the sadness of all the things that had brought him here.
He saw his home as it was now, the quiet rooms that could not hide their emptiness, and he thought again of the man on the hill, and the warmth of the space he would have shared with his wife. Andy smiled as the tears ran down his face, thinking of himself when he was Ben’s age, how he had hoped that places such as this station could be a proxy to the lives that others worked to build, lied to himself that they were.
Lies he had told himself of stations filled with the life and warmth, honesty and love that he could see in the eyes of that man as he came to know what it was he was losing in the night.
Ben told himself the same lies now, Andy knew, and his anger came as much from Andy exposing the lie as it did from anywhere else.
It was early morning by then, the first sun painting the dark brick of sleeping buildings he could see through the kitchen window with the orange hues it seems to save for this time of day. The birds began to call in the unfolding day.
Andy went quietly down the stairs and took his gear off the truck, crossing the engine bay to hang it away for another time. The gear they had worn out there in the night was already stowed in bags, in the small room off to the side of the engine bay ready for the drycleaner who would come later and take the huge piles, and try to wash away all that sweat and dirt and fear.
He stood for a while in the small space set aside for the pegs they hung their gear on at the base of the stairs, with his hand on the dark heavy material of his tunic. It was the sort of place that you got into and out of quickly without a second thought as the bells called incessantly. He has so many countless times before.
So many times, and yet he barely knew the place and he found himself pausing to look about and try to get a sense of it, enough of a feel that it might remain. He had never thought of not being there again.
He made his silent way up the stairs, solid stairs that did not betray him and he was glad of that. It was still early, before the time he would normally be getting up in the small bedroom and he could hear the heavy snoring coming from behind other closed bedroom doors.
He went back into the kitchen, got a tall glass of water, thinking he had had enough coffee for a while. When he turned carefully to take it over to the table he realised that Ben was already there, sitting with a chair rocked back against the far wall so that he could look out to the sun starting to track across the roofs of the houses stretching down to the sea.
“You alright Andy, did you go to bed?”
“No, no I didn’t. Just needed to sit and think a bit.”
“Those things you were saying up on the hill, they were what comes from a job in a hundred getting to you that little bit more. That’s all.”
Andy smiled, knowing how much Ben wanted that to be the answer.
“I wish. Ben, I’ve always been proud that you believed you could learn so much from me. But this is the most important thing I will have to teach you, before it’s too late.”
“What am I supposed to learn? That you want to cry and think those people were judging you and you came up short?”
“Yeah. I do want to cry. And I did come up short when they judged me. And I know how far short you would fall too. I’m ashamed to think so much of what you are now, and the things you have thrown away to be that, are because you were learning from me.”
He saw Ben tense and rise in the chair, pushing his back up the wall.
“I am exactly what I want to be.”
“You’re not, remember how honest you’ve been with me, until now. But even if you were, you need to admit to what is to come. We’re no different to so many other men before us. Men who had it all, were exactly what they wanted to be. You only fail when you make the same mistake again.”
“I don’t make the same mistakes twice.”
“Really, how’s Michelle doing?”
Ben bristled at that, the mention of the woman he would go home to soon making this more real than he wanted it. He brought the chair down on all fours, leaning forwards and crossing his arms he looked up at Andy where he still stood with the glass in his hand.
“That woman made you think of your wife Andy, so what? And your daughter, so what? You were busting your ass to learn how to do this impossible thing while you were trying to be a husband, a dad. And it didn’t work. It doesn’t work for so many of us, you think we’re all wrong, bad people?”
“I don’t think we are bad people Ben. I think we know a lot more than we make out though. We drink and shout, and rage, and disappear. And break ourselves down, maybe trying to get those things out. And we expect our wives, our kids, to stand by and take all that and still be there without ever giving them the chance to ask why? Without ever listening to what it does to them.
You remember last week Ben, you were annoyed when I let you down on Wednesday, when I was supposed to help with that firewood? I went down the coast, a guy I worked with even before you came along, in the city, he rang me out of the blue just to catch up. I hadn’t heard from him in years.
He asked how I was, how my daughter was, that’s how long it’s been. Turned out he was on his way to a funeral, a guy I never worked with died, fishing accident off the rocks. Dan, that’s the guy, he said nothing more really. But I went down there, because he did say more somehow. I turned up at the funeral and we dodged the wake, sat up above one of those windy south coast beaches and drank coffee. He sat forward and looked out to sea so I couldn’t see all that needed to come out. His mate had a rod with him, no bait, no tackle. Maybe they washed away. Maybe. But his mate had a wife and kids and he was the king of a station in the south. And just a couple of times he’d talked to Dan, asked him if it really was everything, this thing we do. Talked of how he didn’t know anymore, how he saw all the things it robbed him of, how it left him with nothing to give once he was outside the station.
And then Dan found himself asking the same question of the men he works with now, when he felt safe enough to do it. And he saw them close off to him, saw them react the way you did up on the hill. And just when he was thinking of how selfish he had been, taking away what his mate had shared for himself, thinking he should try and help. Well, there was that fishing accident….
How many funerals have we been to Ben? You’re a smart man, you can see patterns, all those men had everything. And then they just had a bit of a blip, the sort that you take care of by taking a bit of time off, going on a bender, a week fishing with some mates. And we all carried on as if they would be back as good as new, and we had done all we could.”
“We did do all we could Andy. Men are different. We have to take responsibility, especially us. Think of what we did up there last night Andy, who would you trust to do that for you?”
“Not many. That’s not the point. What you do now, when you go home to Michelle is just as important, more.”
Ben stood up and moved around the table, he was the same height as Andy and bigger physically. “I know you might feel that you’ve let people down Andy, I don’t. Don’t you go judging me now, just because you want to break yourself down into pieces.”
Andy looked down to the water in his untouched glass and the blued shape of Ben passed through it, distorted, as he left the room quickly, taking the stairs two at a time. The others were up now and the station became loud quickly, Andy moved away into the empty space of the TV room with a section of the paper to escape the hubbub.
The oncoming shift began to arrive and Andy heard each in turn climb the stairs and say their hellos, heard the cars backing out of the yard behind the station and knew Ben had gone already. He folded the unread paper and was about to get up and find his things read to leave when Sam snuck through the gap of the door and pushed it closed behind him.
Andy watched Sam come quietly towards him, the way he carefully moved his big frame, the quiet tone Andy knew he would use when he finally spoke. They were Andy’s, he recognised them and knew how much attention Sam had always paid. It hurt him now, just as with Ben, to think of all that they had learned from him, and yet how little that really was when it came down to it. The man on the hill had taught him so much more, in those few snatched moments.
“I thought that was you Andy, mind if I come in?” Sam hovered over the armchair next to Andy’s and Andy smiled as if to say ‘are you kidding’ and the young man sat down quickly, leaning forward on the chair’s front edge.
“I’m knackered Andy, and I didn’t do anything last night.”
Andy smiled again. Sam was so vulnerable. He could have had such an ego, and he had none.
“There’s nothing for you to worry about Sam”, Andy said. “I know you, you think that something has happened between Ben and me. And it has. But it’s something that has needed to happen forever, and there is nothing you could have done to make it different or better.”
“I thought things did go well up there Andy, as well as they could?”
“Yep. It isn’t about that at all. It is all about what I said at the back of the pump, before we headed back. There may come a time when all this seems too much, and I want you to be as honest about that as you have ever been about anything.
But for me it’s more. I’ve done so many things in my life that I wish I hadn’t. And I have always used the excuse of this work.
You learn from me, you think. Learn this, that I am saying that I have been a terrible example for you to follow. That’s my shame. You are not a weak man Sam, not like me. You need to get home to your family.”
The men looked at each other then for the first time, Sam had told Andy all of what made up his life with his wife and young daughter, not good things.
“Don’t worry. I learnt something up there last night that I have to unravel. I wish I learnt it long ago, before I lost everything else. I wish I could go home and be a dad. You can, and you should. It might not be perfect today, and that’s your fault. But that doesn’t mean they don’t want you there.”
Andy put his hand on the young man’s shoulder and they just looked at each other for a time.
“Shouldn’t I be asking what I can do to help you today Andy?”
“Thanks Sam. I don’t know what it is I’m asking for just yet though. Its enough to know that you will listen when I do. Most won’t. It will help me to know you are heading home.”
Sam stood up to his full height slowly, stretching his back. He nodded down to Andy one last time, “You call me when you need”.  He moved quietly out of the room and the voices from the mess room came through the small opening left at the door. Andy got up slowly and collected his paper, looking around the large quiet room, all the things which had always seemed so inconsequential and yet now stood in stark relief. The whiteboard filled the far end of the room with its ghosts of rubbed out coloured lines and words dissecting all those jobs they had planned for, debriefed from. It seemed to him now they had tried so hard to expunge these things, rub them from their minds as finished and done. And the ghosts of the lines were the marks on his knife, and the shadows of his dreams, never gone, always another one to come. He didn’t know if he had room, strength, for the next.
He went out into the hallway, poked his head through the open kitchen door and waved hello to the men gathered around the table ready for their turn here. He moved away before they could ask the questions he knew would come if he stayed, stepping lightly and quickly down the stairs and out the back to the locker room. Sam passed slowly down the driveway in his small car, the window open and he raised his arm into a last slow wave and then was gone.
Andy collected his few things and stepped back out into the morning, looking up to the light splayed across the apartments that bordered the station, backing up to them with the small balconies uniformly crowded with clothes horses and BBQs.
And finally he too was gone, joining the flow of traffic and away. They would not be back for four days and he found his head full of thoughts of the woman, and the man.


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