ROADSCAPE

It appears to disappear, the dual carriageway. Whining between two hills. Colleen’s breasts. Then inexorably, inevitably, a tunnel. Or a funnel. Or chunnel. Cleft in the skirt of emerald. A part of the great design. Apart, I cannot weave inroads. Yet I can see. I can see.

The road is never constant, ever shifty. Through the day long I suffer vehicles of one kind or another, discharge after discharge, charging away, varoom, varoom, from my window as if I were about to pluck one in mid-flight and gobble it down for a snack. Consumerism run riot, indigestible to some. A pantechnicon on a long haul, headlights immanent as eyes, bumper smiling. A Volkswagen hot on its trail like a calf elephant, beetling in from a trunk road. A petrol tanker, its bold, blazoned face like a used car salesman’s radial smile. I strive to catch an impression of Ben Hall or the armour-plated Kellys clopping the blue eucalypt trail through rocky passes , clip-clop, clip-clop, but merely a tow truck from a festive lubritorium bites the dust.

Highway robbery accelerates. Take the tow truck driver. He and his truck are welded as one: a-r-t-i-c-u-l-a-t-e-d. The towie is encapsuled in a mobile cabin, his self-containerised world. He mutters few words. To himself, of course. The truck utters volumes – poison, admittedly, but what’s the differential? This inmate is on watch right round the clock, straining to snare a screech or scrunch, a huge, huge scratch. He has a vested stake in the chips of cut glass that ornament our highways and low ways, bye-ways and dead ends to such razzle-dazzling effect, but his speed off the mark and ve hic u lar (mm, must’ve been intoxicated) and his vehicular concern are roadworthy commendations. Hear, Knights of the Road, let me nail the Distinguished Servicing Medal to your . . . skull.

The tow truck tyro is a sports model not very sporting. Yesterday afternoon, or morning, or some previous day, at two past two two tow truck drivers – yes, I remember the hour vividly – two tow truck drivers were hurtling towards each other along the duel carriageway. Just a joust for easy greasy pickings. The town planners had haphazardly bequeathed an intersection just at the point where their careers were due to overlap. This full frontal exhibition resembles the power of a tourney, but after the bingling and tinkling, the smashing and gnashing, the leaking and screeching, both mercenaries were lying on their ironsides, as heavily caparisoned charges were wont to do, their jibs and joists jettisoned.

A mere atom of a second exploded before four more tow trucks in their black and white guernseys, identical zebras on safari, orange neons a beacon for auto-wrecked motorists, converged from four different directions and stables to encircle the inoperative trucks, a wagon train against a tribe of paleface commuters spluttering in their saloons, of frigidaire wives spinning out of their cocoons like a hydra along the four approach roads. Stumped at one end of this hydraulic limb wailed an ambulance, a far cry from the crux of the matter, whilst a nuclear family of self-service tow trucks was holding up the distended sinews of disgruntled road hogs. At last the disabled were escorted away by their hang-ups to the knackers’ yard. What became of these auto-wrecks, no-one knows. There was no profit salvaging their bodywork too. Horse feed? Most unlikely. Battery men are as tasteless as beakless chickens. Perhaps their arterial veins were severed and they died a natural death, or they were hooked onto their own pulleys to complete the vicious circle of articulation, hoisted with their own petard above the scrapheap of twisted bones and detritus, whence they will be summoned before their five-star Manufacturer, the Omnipotent Deus ex Machina Himself, Lord of the Assembly Line. Who cares? Why kowtow to the k.o. tow?

And then I detected these zebras everywhere, their giraffe necks craning over the wall, sniffing for a prang-bang, and the rescue party of four begat four more and these four begat four more, that in turn processed a whole traffic-jam of zebras, so that your common or garden road hog was being winched up and led away whether he liked it or not, thus cleansing the air of inexhaustible carbon dioxide but adding to the toxic gases fumigating the ozone sealing because these trucks of one thousand z.p. exude their own excremental disorders, and the more they rev forth and multiply the more their droppings macadam ta very much our die-ways with greasy topsoil, so that even the pedestrians find it impossible to keep their feet, which by definition they are compelled to do, but they too are picked up by wallowing zebras, debriefed by military experts, scoured by R.S.P.C.A. personnel, re-briefed by the Salvation Army, then confined till they have re-found their feet. Whether they fall on or off their feet or stand on or off their head, they cannot overtake the zillions of zebras that by this stage of evolution have pleaded penitence and spread their sprouting wing panels to dominate the sky-ways too, like humungous hornets, firing sting rays at the unarmed pedestrian, who hasn’t a leg to stand on – except in a dictionary – because all freeways are slithery sloughs of despond and only airborne creatures like tow trucks, or other loftily conceived squadrons like Hell’s Angels, have facility of movement, not to mention grace, and they only because they must tow the line or suffer a breakdown or risk having their spark plugs disembowelled on a crucifix of axle bones.

‘How are we today?’ A voice of the nurse appears in my right ear.

I turn my eyes and head. I smell the nurse, the soapy hands. He smiles. Or winces. He wrings his hands. Perhaps he is nervous. I try a smile at him. He feels more relaxed.

He says, ‘You do find that road fascinating, don’t you?’ And chuckles whimsically fake.

I say, ‘Life is a journey. So they say.’

Finally, he says, ‘Yes, well, must keep moving. Glad to see you better.’

I look back at the pane and see off-white jacket and teeth deflected. He must be smiling. But why? What’s he advertising? His self-image? His faith in me? Or lack of it? Yet, if he’s not smiling, he may be angry. With me.

‘It’s raining,’ I say.

‘You’ve noticed then,’ he says.

‘Hardly. It’s always raining.’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Unless it’s fine. Like yesterday.’

‘I don’t remember yesterday,’ I say.

I confront the pane. His fist comes up to his face. He scratches a spot. Or picks his nose. Or gouges out an eye. I pretend to suspect nothing. I follow the droplets down his face. He is crying. Till that slash across his mouth. He is laughing. I want to scream, rain, vomit, smash the pane.

Instead:

‘Still raining,’ I say.

‘Indeed it is,’ opens the slash.

‘Not a bright patch anywhere,’ I say.

‘I’m afraid you’re right there.’

‘It’s all so depressing outside.’

‘Why don’t you look at the tele?’ he says. ‘It’ll take you out of yourself.’

‘I must go for a walk,’ I say.

‘What, in this weather? But you can’t. It’s cats and dogs out there.’

‘That’s why. I really must get walking.’

Finally, he says, ’Oh all right. But wrap yourself up against the elements.’

‘I always do,’ I say.

There is a green hill far away. Or not so far. Oh Colleen. Roses blush in your hair. Lilies lie at your breast. Beyond the grizzle of rain. Beyond the weals of time. Beyond the shadows of doubt.

Michael Small

May, 1974

published Westerly, W.A., 1978

& Her Natural Life and Other Stories, Tamarillo, 1988