Caravan Story Page 11
The bus turns, I strain my neck to see behind me but the oval, the camp, the people are gone. So we have been saved? I look back down the bus; everyone is very quiet. But stop, I want to say, so what if we are chosen, so what if we survive—how will we live with our consciences? Three hundred of our kind have been left behind—how will we live with that? I think these things but I cannot say them. I have half-raised myself in my seat. A few rows in front of me, just behind the driver, one of the passengers turns around. It’s Judd. (When did he get on? I didn’t see him get on.) He gives me a smile, then turns forward again. I’m on a bus with Polly-fuckers? I’m here because I’ve pleasured her, not because I can write? I look around at the other heads, men and women. Polly, her apple smell, the dark of her nipples, the cream of her thighs—is that all that binds us together? All the other aspiring writers, some good, some bad, some mediocre, sitting down to their poison pies—and we go free because we gave the whore what she wants?
The bus turns again, off the dirt road and onto the bitumen. I look out the window; under an almost-full moon the fences, the paddocks, the wheatfields look ghostly and strange. We drive and drive. The landscape doesn’t change. Now the monitor above the driver’s head flickers on and starts scrolling a piracy warning. Judd gets up from his seat—he’s holding a big square Tupperware container. He starts walking down the aisle, distributing sandwiches wrapped in grease-proof paper to each of the passengers. When he hands me my sandwich he gives me what I can’t help thinking is a warm and genuine smile. The video starts—it’s Chinatown, with Jack Nicholson; we fade in on a black and white photograph, a man and a woman. A voice groans. I unwrap my sandwich but I don’t feel hungry. The man looking at the photo throws something at the wall. Judd puts the Tupperware container in an overhead locker and sits back down in his seat. A new story is unfolding, H——is far behind me now, I’ve already let it go. You’ve got to move on. Perhaps we’re not all Polly-fuckers, perhaps Judd is here for the sandwiches, the paperwork at the other end? Perhaps I am here because of my Laburnum story, because my Laburnum story is good? Now the other character in the scene with Jack Nicholson is sobbing, tearing at the blinds. I look out the window. Still the same. I half-close my eyes. I open them again. Jack Nicholson pours a shot of bourbon. I watch for a little while longer then close my eyes again.
two
The bus stops. It’s morning. I must have slept for hours. We’re in a country town somewhere. I can see wide streets with footpaths and houses. A big country town. The driver gets out of the bus. Some passengers are still asleep, some are just waking up now. I raise myself in my seat a little and look out through the windscreen. The driver is standing in front of a high wire mesh gate, sorting through his keys. Now I see where we are—it’s a school, a secondary school, but it’s been closed down; all around as far as I can see is a high wire mesh fence topped with strands of barbed wire. The grounds are overgrown with weeds; leaf litter and bits of rubbish are piled up in corners where the wind has blown them. The building is one of those long drab 1970s types, clad with pressed-pebble-and-concrete slabs. The gum trees planted as saplings when the school was built have now grown into giants, dropping gumnuts, bark and whole branches onto the asphalt.
The driver finds the key he’s been looking for and opens the padlock on the gate. He swings it back, first one side, then the other, and climbs back into the bus. He takes a moment at the top of the step to look around at his passengers—everyone looks expectantly back at him. But he doesn’t say anything, he sits back down in his seat, puts the bus in gear and drives up to the front steps of the school. He stops again, the brakes hiss; he turns off the ignition. You can stretch your legs now if you want, he says, but don’t wander too far. He steps down out of the bus again and through the side window I can see him wandering away a little, lighting a cigarette, then standing there on the asphalt, smoking.
The passengers begin to stir, tentatively at first: standing up, stretching, looking at their watches. They must have multiplied during the night. Is it just me, I think, or are there more now than when we started? I do a quick head count: twenty-three. I count again. Yes, there are more, but curiously Judd the factotum is no longer with us. We must have picked up some people in the night, and when we did, Judd must have left us. For good? I check all the heads again. Some passengers are now taking the driver at his word, walking down the aisle to the steps. Men, women, young, old—it’s all as much a mystery as before. The new passengers, the ones who must have got on in the night, are also carrying folders, but theirs are blue plastic, the envelope type, with the little velcro tab to keep them closed. I watch as the passengers, in ones and twos, stand up and make their way down the aisle, some brushing past me from behind and smiling down at me as they pass.
I’m one of the last to get out of the bus: it’s cool outside, it’s rained overnight, and there’s a heavy metallic smell coming off the wet asphalt. I can also smell the rich aroma of wet gum leaves, of rotting humus, damp earth, and a faint whiff of diesoline. I go and sit on the front steps of the school; I put my folder in my lap and start jiggling my knees. We’re obviously waiting for someone or something—the driver has finished his cigarette and butted it out with his shoe and is now sitting on a bench seat under a nearby tree and he too is jiggling his knees. The bus makes a kind of ticking sound. How far did we travel? Were we driving all night? A woman walks over to the driver and asks him a question: he points behind him and the woman goes in that direction. She must have asked him about the toilets. A middle-aged man is walking about, swinging his arms back and forth, stretching his neck from side to side. He’s getting ready to get back on the bus, I think, limbering up for the next part of the journey. So is this only a stopover, a rest break? But just as I am thinking this, a car arrives and pulls up beside the bus. It’s an early model white Laser hatchback, with a small dint in the front passenger side panel. A young man gets out—late twenties, early thirties—and walks past me up the front steps with a bunch of keys in his hand. The driver gets up from his seat. The young man opens the front door then walks back down the steps. I stand up. Everyone has stopped what they were doing, waiting for instructions. The young man leans over into the front seat of his car and takes out a briefcase which he then rifles through until he finds what he is looking for. He puts a piece of paper on the bonnet and the driver, knowing the routine, takes a pen and signs it. The young man glances through it, puts it back in his briefcase, then goes around to the back of his car and opens the boot. The bus starts up but a dozen or so people now start running back to it, calling out to the driver that they’ve left their folders on board. The rest of us stand and watch. The young man asks the person nearest to him to grab a box from the boot—he grabs the other, tucks it under his arm, closes the boot with his elbow and walks back up the steps. The people who’d panicked start filing back out of the bus with their folders; the reversing lights and the beeper come on, the bus backs out, points itself in the direction it originally came from and drives away. The young man calls out to us—This way now, please! Everyone moves up the steps. Someone holds the front door open and we all file through.
It’s very cold inside the building, a cold concrete chill that gets right inside your bones. We gather in the open office area: the young man keeps stepping backwards until he is standing hard up against a door with a sign on it that says ‘Principal’. Welcome, he says—could you please close the door? My name is Dean, we will soon be moving down to your classroom. The nearest toilets are in the breezeway at the end of the main corridor: boys to the right, girls to the left. The sick bay is just around the corner here to my left; the canteen is outside off the main corridor to the right. This area would normally be out of bounds. I will show you to your sleeping quarters later. All right then, off we go. After this brief and slightly pointless introduction he pushes his way back through the crowd, gesturing for his carrier to follow, and starts walking down what he called the main corridor until we come to an intersec
tion with further corridors off to our left and right. Toilets down that way! he says. Canteen to the right! He turns left and we all follow. At the end of this corridor we turn right, climb a few steps and stop in front of an empty classroom. Outside, the schoolyard is deserted, leaves and bark are scattered across the asphalt, here and there a window has been smashed and there’s graffiti on the walls. But aside from the dank smell and the thin layer of dust on the window ledges and lockers, the inside of the building is surprisingly intact.
The teacher—the young man (but no, he is obviously now ‘the teacher’)—takes out his keys and opens the classroom door. He drops his box on the front table—his carrier does the same—and puts his briefcase on the floor beside it. He waves us in. We file inside. It’s actually very beautiful in here, in this room, the long walk has taken us from the southern to the north-eastern side of the building and the morning sun is streaming in through the wall of windows along one side. It’s warmer than the office area by at least ten or more degrees. Through the windows I can see a basketball court and a grass playing area with a cluster of bench seats arranged under a big gum tree with dark sappy bark. Beyond that I can see the back fences and roofs of the adjoining houses. It’s the strangest feeling, then, to think that just over there whole families are living normal lives. I can see clothes on a washing line, the top of a children’s swing. Far away, way over there past the roof tops, I can see what looks like a TV or telephone tower. The overnight showers have cleared and the sky has broken blue.
People have started to take their seats at the tables arranged around the room, two chairs per table. I get one of the last window seats, right up the back of the classroom. There are names and love messages written on the desk; on the window ledge beside me are the papery bodies of dead blowflies. Someone takes the seat next to mine, a gawky man with square-framed glasses, while at the front of the class the teacher cleans algebraic calculations from the whiteboard with the end of his sleeve. Someone at the table in front opens their folder and starts arranging their papers. Very soon this action becomes infectious: without any specific instructions from the teacher everyone starts opening their folders and arranging their papers on their desks. The teacher meanwhile has opened the larger of the two boxes and taken out a TV monitor and a VCR. He sets them up on the front table with the monitor facing the class. All right, he says, beaming: holiday’s over! With a black whiteboard marker he draws a straight line across the width of the whiteboard, quickly divides it into three sections by intersecting the horizontal line with two short vertical strokes (the middle section becoming the longest), then above the line he writes, in Roman numerals: I, II and III.
A holiday? A holiday. So that’s all it was? The caravan, the tents, the long stretched-out days of summer. It was a holiday. We left the city, went to the country, found a campsite, made new friends, broke with old routines, renewed ourselves. The writer’s life—it’s a holiday! I wake up late, masturbate, linger over breakfast. Maybe if I’m lucky I write a dozen lines. At three o’clock a tidal wave of tiredness comes over me and I fall back into bed. I wake up an hour later, look out the caravan window, talk to myself about doing more work but of course I never do. I’m on holidays. I’m hanging the washing on the chrome rail at the front of my caravan, I’m shaking the sand from my shoes, I’m walking to the shower block with a towel slung over my shoulder and a sticky cake of soap in my hand. In the neighbouring caravans I can hear the other holiday-makers laughing, or arguing, or whispering quietly; out on the playground I can hear the dull pop of a tennis ball being hit. As evening falls the smell of barbecued meat drifts across the camp and outside their caravans and tents the adults sit and drink and talk while the children play their last game of hide-and-seek in the dark. I’ve been on holidays, that’s what it was, and now I’m here to work.
These thoughts have both disturbed and enlivened me (A holiday>, all a holiday, and this now the real beginning?) and I watch the teacher working at the whiteboard and see what he’s doing with a very clear, very vivid eye. I look around me, the classroom, the students. Back to school, I think. Everyone is sitting up, straight-backed, looking at the whiteboard. The teacher has now written above his horizontal line the three words: SET-UP, CONFRONTATION, RESOLUTION. He steps back from the whiteboard and points to it with his marker. The Paradigm, he says. This word, ‘paradigm’, rings in the classroom air like a bell: shiny, silver, singingly clear. He walks back to the whiteboard and writes PARADIGM on it, in big capital letters. All right, he says, now let’s put this paradigm to the test.
It’s all moving too fast for me, I already feel like a dunce, like I’ve already fallen through the cracks. He’s talking about Chinatown, of course, the movie on the bus, this is what he means by the paradigm and the test. But all I saw was the SET-UP, and even this small part I watched with my thoughts elsewhere. Soon I wasn’t even watching at all but was looking through my reflection in the dark window out onto the moonlit fields and the fenceposts flashing past. Where are we going? Where are we off to now? Are we really the chosen few, off to something new, something better? And where is she now, my partner, she and her friends? Has she too found a better life? (We drifted apart, I don’t know why—did I too quickly base everything on the elasticity of her flesh? We drifted apart and I fucked Polly and entered into this obscene agreement. But she now, where is she?) With these thoughts, the dark night, the moonlit landscape, the rhythm of the road, my eyelids began to droop and close. I didn’t watch Chinatown, I didn’t know I was supposed to (again—how many times?—I have confused recreation with work). Not long after Faye Dunaway made her first appearance in Jack Nicholson’s office I was far away and sound asleep.
Now the teacher is asking questions and down the front especially people are throwing up their hands. The teacher points to the raised hands with his marker, dashing back and forth to the whiteboard and scribbling things on it. He’s talking about structure, story structure, we’re learning how to structure our work. The holiday’s over. People are responding enthusiastically, throwing up their hands, calling out suggestions—Confrontation! says someone. Obstacles! says another. A story in pictures! says a third—and the teacher, like a prowling caged animal, lurches back and forth between these shouted suggestions and his increasingly frenetic-looking whiteboard. I have taken my Laburnum papers out of my folder and among them I have found some blank sheets; I put one of these sheets in front of me and at the top of this sheet I write the word PARADIGM and draw a line underneath it. Beneath that I draw a copy of the teacher’s diagram with the marks and numbers on it and beneath that I start to write the words that out of the jumble on the whiteboard I think might be important. But very soon there are just too many words being shouted out and written down by the teacher. I start doodling: first I draw a face, then a stick figure body on it, then a whole lot of other stick-figure bodies, then all of them running over a cliff. Then for a while I just draw lines up and down along the border of my page: a bold line, then a thin line, then a bold line again, and then fancy swirls in the corner. The teacher has turned on the TV and the VCR; the piracy warning scrolls; he goes back to the whiteboard and reduces the amount of scribble on it until all that’s left is the divided line and a few words and phrases written at all different angles around it. He circles the words ‘a story in pictures’ just as Chinatown starts and we fade in again on the full-screen photograph, the man and the woman making love, then Jack Nicholson under the fan and the other character down the wall.
While I concentrate very hard this time on the movie I realise that the gawky man with the glasses sitting next to me has meanwhile slipped a folded piece of paper across the table so that it is sticking out a little from under the sheet of paper I have been doodling on. His eyes are looking towards the front of the class, ostensibly watching the movie too, but around his mouth I can see the unmistakable signs of a smile. I unfold the piece of paper, keeping my eyes to the front, then quickly glance down at it. Fuck the paradigm, it says.
I smile, and fold the paper up again. Suddenly everything in the classroom goes quiet. The video has been paused—the frozen image of Jack Nicholson leaning back in his chair quivers slightly—and the teacher is standing beside it with his hands on his hips. Are we all right? he says. Are we all right up the back there? You, he says, pointing to my neighbour: what main elements of the story set-up have we seen so far? My neighbour doesn’t answer, but he can’t wipe the smile from his face. You might think it’s all a big joke now, mister, says the teacher, his hands still firmly planted on his hips, but come exam time we might wipe that smile from your face. There’s a very heavy silence in the room now—everyone knew they had to take all this very seriously but no-one, not even the teacher’s pets down the front, thought it might get as serious as this. Exams? Even my neighbour, who in his short time in the spotlight had happily assumed the role of class clown, is no longer smiling. It might just be worth reiterating, the teacher is saying, before we go any further, that each and every one of you is very lucky to be here. Your former colleagues—let’s just say they have fallen by the wayside. You can hold on to your romantic dreams all you like, I’m sure some of you still do, but the fact is there is only one way to make a living out of telling stories and that is by having your stories told on celluloid within the paradigm of a three-act structure—something that, I remind you, you lucky people now have the opportunity of doing, should you choose to take it. I don’t want to play ‘the teacher’, he says, I’m just here to help you get out of the writing rut you were in, but if any of you are not prepared to listen and learn, then please, there’s the door. The teacher has taken his left hand off his hip and is pointing at the door with the index finger of it. There is a substantial pause. Right, he says, satisfied: then let’s get back to work!