ldt081: One Room One Night..a short story of pain and loss
#081 - [ One Room One Night..a short story of pain and loss ] [ petrol boy ]
SYNOPSIS:
A slice of a torn and twisted life
One room one night one chapter.
A grieving son spends the night
in each of the rooms of his late
mother's flat.
He describes the feelings and
the objects discovered in the
rooms and how they change his
life and the woman he thought
he knew.
EXAMPLE PASSAGE:
ROOM - Kitchen
NIGHT - Saturday night.
THEME - Country and western hell
The door is closed but not locked.
like all the other rooms he can
leave at any time.
The rules are simple.
If you can find food, you eat.
If you can find a toilet, you can piss
If you can find a bed, you sleep
(if you're lucky).
If you can stick it out in the same
room for the night you have won the
victory over the room and over death itself.
Her life becomes valid and your life
can go on.
If you back out before the time is up
you know it and you'll be dogged by it
for all time.
Country and western hell?
Yes.
A truck stop of a kitchen minus check
plastic tablecloths.
Bakelite radiowaves invade his eardrums.
He listens for the news that his Mum's
death is a gigantic hoax and huffs a
bit more *petrol to bring out the secret
messages. He hears the replay of the
Eureka stockade massacre coming life
from the plastic trumpeteer on the
masonite kitchen bench. Again he inhales.
The petrol is working its magic and
he has become an emblem on his mother's
casket. His speech to her comes backward
in Arabic and he is trapped with her for
all time. American airliners are grounded
by some distant emergency. He's had to
identify his mother's body at the coroner's
office. Her purple face comes back at him like
a housebrick in the face and he screams again, burying his face in his shirt
to hide the noise.
The boy/man wants to vomit out his pain
like bad fish. To expel the grief from
his body as quickly as possible.
2 days after he put his mother's ashes in the ground someone stole his car.
The petrol huffing
has him convinced it is Satanists or the CIA.
Domestic disputes ring out from the
back of the kitchen door. Loud enough
to frighten him but just out of the
range of comprehension.
He was always afraid of the distant
menace of raised voices.
They had a way of rooting him to the
spot and leaving him pinned there for
hours, too scared to breathe in all
but little puppy breaths.
He couldn't remember most of his
childhood but he could remember that.
He knew his mother had picked some real
'characters' for boyfriends. She'd always
claimed she was looking for a father for
him but she never seemed to ask him
which one he wanted.
If he'd had his choice it would have
been Doug.
Doug was boring but nice.
He was in the army and wore his uniform
with pride but he looked and acted like
an accountant. No matter how menacing the
uniform was meant to look it didn't on him.
He'd bring the boy shells of different colours.
He'd race him up the steaming summer path of
the mutual driveway, shared by all the flats
in this block.
Troy should have had a father like this
instead of the one he had.
The one that screamed at him all the time
and frightened kids and parents alike.
Every morning the 'gang' would check to see
if he was still alive and they'd fully
expect to find him covered in bruises or worse.
Doug was a man of no mystery but the kind
of heart that you could see through a
cloud of winter fog.
Domestic Hell.
Not in a world filled with Doug.
He turns on the radio.
It's NewsRadio on the ABC.
There's nothing in the rules
about what channel the radio had to be on.
Everything was September 11.
Opinions and reports on the latest news
from all around the world.
He cleans the stove buttons for something to
do. They're covered in furry grease behind
the dials. His mother had been starting down
the path of becoming old and sick. She had a
fascination with the diseases of the world as
did many women of her generation but the day
to day bite of illness was starting to whittle
her away. She never wanted to slowly decay in
a hospice, dependent on others and clinging to
another day hoping for it to be the last.
It was harder to clean things and she made up
excuses. Her eyesisght was going so she didn't
always notice anyway.
He felt the warm caress of satisfaction on his
troubled soul as he watched the grease submit
to the detergent and rag (his own combination).
He loved taking dirty things and making them
clean. As long as they were someone else's.
For some reason he'd always had trouble with
his own dishes, bathroom, garden and so on.
His mother was the same.
The dials now shone like brown plastic jewels,
gleaming as if they had just been unveiled in
an appliance showroom. For now he felt a little
better. He knew it wouldn't last.
He tried to open the oven door only to find the
handle came off in his hand, leaving a stub and
some holes as mute testimony to their fragile
state. Tears welled in his eyes as he realised
this was an old problem she never mentioned.
She used the oven all the time to cook tasty
roasted treats for her family. This was not a
new problem. She'd just kept quiet. Don't make
a fuss. Suffer quietly.
9 years in a Catholic Hell hole boarding school
had taught her that. Her sentence - 9 years on
a freezing Geelong verandah. Her crime - having
no father and mother.
The Japanese had a saying that stuck in his mind.
'The nail that sticks out gets hammered down'.
She'd been hammered down before she stuck out.
In some areas She stuck out later and would never
be hammmered down again. Their hammer was jealousy.
Her nail was her blonde haired innocent beauty.
In others she would remain quiet and small, scared
of yet another fall of the hammer.
He placed the amputated handle on the bench next to
the stove and caught on emotional fire. Sobbing in
spasms, he felt he was burning up on the inside, his
energy draining from him with each convulsion. The
crying fits would stop as suddenly as they started.
They would start for the stupidest reason and stop
for no reason at all, sometimes mid sob.
It was going to be a long night and he was going to
stay for the whole thing.
The happy couple from next door had finished raising
their voices and he could now faintly hear the sound
of a woman groaning. The sort of groan you have to
listen to. You have to listen in order to sort out
whether she needs help or not. He couldn't tell.
He turned down the radio. As the voices from the
speakers faded away her realised that the groans were
of the type a woman makes when she 'doesn't want to
be disturbed at all, thank you very much'.
The sound of the bouncing bedsprings was an added clue.
He was strangely attracted and repelled by those sounds.
Any time he heard them (you hear them frequently in
dense living environments) he had to admit to a feeling
of a little excitement. He also had to admit to a feeling
of moral revulsion. He suffered the torture of Catholicism
as well. His mother, like many abused children, had remained
faithful to her abuser for years and had sent him to a
catholic school.
The Josephite Nuns had shown him fear and hate and the
guilt of sex before he even knew what it was. They had
even given him a comprehensive education in the evils
of asking to go to the toilet during class time as one
afternoon he had to sit through an entire afternoon covered
in his own urine.
One didn't ask to go to the toilet.
He could hold his water like a good boy and it would stand
him in excellent stead in the kitchen this very night.
Another rule of the house absorbtion exercise is that you have to inhale
some *petrol in every room so you can see the visions
and absorb the flavours of the room and the dearly departed.
Any messages that need to be passed on from the aether are
transmitted via this medium.
Inhaling petrol is a very dangerous practice.
Try finding out what is actually in the stuff and you'll usually find some
stonewalling and general fluff from the oil companies (remember benzine?).
So you should always use
unleaded.
Inhale and feel your lungs burn.
Inhale and see the visions start to happen again.
Inhale and fight the demons of your own mind.
Inhale and die a worthless death of a drug addict.
Inhale deeply. If you're lucky you'll join her.
But you know you're not that lucky.
This is the first night and the first room.
You have 5 rooms and 5 nights to go (not including the garage).
He opens the lazy susan under the sink and finds 26 bottles of diet soft
drink. She's a diabetic.
karl beesley
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Long Dark Tunnel 2001. - http://ldt.aguk.co.uk - ldt@hushmail.com
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