from work in progress;
note links at bottom to further pieces/h3>
item 1:a scene from the character's
early life
early life
rolled up the incline of Nicklin Street.
His passenger spoke as his home came in
view, indicating the stucco house on the
far corner of the intersection. Nelson
Street didn't quite form a right angle
with Nicklin and the house sat on
something slightly more pointed than a
regular corner block.
When he'd said "That's my place," Michael
had broken a silence which had lasted from
where they dropped Les off, a ten minute
journey across the sleeping city in
virtually empty 2:00 am streets. Now
there were only the two of them in the
car. Michael was enjoying a feeling of
preferment which had taken him by surprise
and thrilled him.
The thrill, which Michael was now frankly
enjoying, had budded twenty minutes
earlier as the Falcon had prowled quietly
through Brisbane's conservative houses
dropping off its tipsy young passengers
until only Leslie Morgan and Michael were
left. Les, worldly for his twenty years
and Michael's senior in the firm as well,
had always acted as if he were Max's
favourite among the young, suited,
talented and male coterie of subordinates
who dreamed up, illustrated and generally
executed the advertising program of the
biggest department store chain in the
state.
Nor did anyone challenge Les for
that honour. Under Max's direction Les
played a leading role among the ten staff
of the advertising department. As a group
they spent thousands of dollars every
week, filling the pages of local
newspapers and now, tentatively, the odd
few minutes of the city's brand new
television broadcasts, with forgettable
pictures and enthusiastic verbiage about
items the store needed to move.
Les's right to be the last one Max dropped
off this morning would have been assumed.
But here Michael found himself, alone in
the car with Max; with Max and the secret,
furious life that continually surged in
his depths and sometimes felt like an
independent entity within him. At this
moment it threatened to breach like a
whale.
They were in his street. The ordinariness
of its bitumen strip and gravel sides, its
separateness from his glamorous new life
in advertising was about to be transformed
forever. Somewhere inside himself
Michael stood at the lip of precipice and
held his breath.
When Michael's father drove his family
home in his taxi he usually didn't turn
into Nelson, but continued up Nicklin past
this intersection and did a u-turn to
bring the vehicle to rest alongside the
gutter adjacent to the kitchen window.
You didn't turn right into Nelson unless
you were coming home to stay for the
night. The driveway into the garage -
shed they'd called it until recently - was
off Nelson. Max, innocent of Michael's
family romance, now reacted to his
announcement by effortlessly swinging the
big sedan into Nelson and rolling to a
stop a handspan out from the kerb and just
beyond the driveway. The car came to rest
under the lee of the small mango tree.
The big mango tree, the one you could
climb and spend hours in, stood on the
Nicklin Street side of the yard, outside
the kitchen.
Whether Michael had intended to simply
open the passenger door and say goodbye
would have been unclear to him if he'd
tried to reconstruct the scene later. As
it happened, Max simply winded him by
switching off the ignition. Michael was
still coping with this irreversible
gesture when Max twisted slightly on the
seat to bring his right shoulder forward
and his left arm to the top of the
backrest. His left hand relaxed close to
Michael. Amber light from the huge pear-
shaped bulb behind them in the corner
street light filtered into the car. Max's
face was half in shadow as he looked
across at Michael.
The sound of the engine died away and the
suburban silence rose up around the car
like floodwater. Michael didn't spend a
lot of time in the present, but he was
squarely in it now. Some deity of whom
he'd previously never suspected the
existence had granted him a wish he'd
never even formulated in his mind. (It
sure wasn't his regular God, who'd never
dealt in wishes.)
So here now was Max, lighting up a
cigarette and filling the cabin with heady
smoke, turning the full beam of his golden
attention upon him. Authority had never
before regarded Michael as worthy of
attention, at least not this kind of
attention. And Michael had something he
wanted to talk to authority about.
He didn't know it then but he would never
get an opportunity like this again.
Authority had never wanted to fuck him
before and never would again. At least
not in the same way. Later, later than
Michael had ever been, he stood on the
dewy, overgrown footpath and counted the
twenty-seven cigarette butts in his direct
line of sight on the bitumen, a car's
width from him. He was the only waking
body within cooee, apart from the rooster
mistakenly declaring the provision of
another ordinary day.
[copyright: Michael O'Neill 1997]
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