Furious Horses

>It was the day of the photos, and as such, Myron was not feeling altogether well. The worst part of him this week was a fawn patch of contact dermatitis on his left calf, which would be safely covered, but it would be just like management to insist that everyone wear shorts.

Previous highlights of Myron’s company photo: A swollen bee sting above his eye; an infected boil on the side of his nose not covered but rather enhanced by convenience-store concealer; an unfortunate case of psoriasis that caused clumps of his hair to fall out. All these horrific and unfortunate facial maladies captured with a business portraitist’s evil sheen—the ubiquitous grey sponged background only pushing his face further into focus.

Myron spent all morning in front of the mirror in a staff bathroom on floor 29, wiping madly at his forehead with a damp antibacterial cloth he had bought from home. So far, nothing had gone wrong with his face. He had stayed away from all flammable surfaces, sharp edges and potentially allergen-filled areas all week. No grotesque facial growths had sprouted overnight. His pus remained hidden safely away wherever it is pus likes to go in its downtime.

Five minutes to go. Myron washed his hands thoroughly with non-allergenic soap. He checked his suit and tie. Then, staring into his own eyes in the streaky mirror, Myron threw up. Just a little disturbance of his stomach—a warm jumble of the morning’s plain oatmeal and organic orange juice coating his chin, dripping into the sink. Myron swung his left palm against the hot tap, leaving a small bruise the shape of Mauritius on his thumb. A painful, close to the bone bruise.

>Taking the long way around the park, I decide to keep on jogging, but only where people can see me. When I disappear behind a tree or shrub, and my only audience does not have opposable thumbs and the ability to gossip about my lack of fitness, I slow to a gasping walk.

I’m just in the process of contemplating what sort of darkness the day has turned into when the bat hits me right in the back of the head. I know it’s a bat because it screeches like a banshee, right in my ear, and I feel the rabid scrabbling of claws against my scalp. While never really having had the irrational fear of bats so many of my friends do, this is, to be perfectly honest, one of the more frightening experiences of my life.

Aren’t bats supposed to have some sort of internal-sonar-inner-ear navigation system to let them avoid just this type of situation? The number of bats that fly above this city on these long summer nights, and not once have I heard about one thudding into someone’s skull.

I realise that I have had my eyes closed the entire time, and that the bat has apparently gone on its way. I open my eyes, and it’s as if they have to readjust to the dark again. The world seems so much more shadowy than the one I’ve just left. Streetlamps seem to have abandoned their purpose, preferring instead to bow their faded heads. Sounds of traffic and city ambience have retreated too. I try to look up to find the moon, but the arms of friendly park foliage have muscled up above me, shielding any comforting reference to the night sky.

I reason with myself that the bat must have knocked me harder than I’d thought. I feel my head, and my hair sticks together in grimy clumps. I feel a slick wetness between my fingers. It’s then I hear the jangling. I turn around. A little man, covered with razorblades, is running towards me. Again, says my leaching brain. Again.

>Monday. Staring at the numbers lighting up in their horizontal column. Turning my eyes to watch a sliver of the city rise up beneath me through the slitted window that runs all the way up the tower shaft. The name, written in pink, lines the rim of the lift, lit up in familiar fluorescent splendour. I breathe out slowly and shift my briefcase from hand to hand. Gravity gives way where I am going. The Bell End, as far as I have gathered, is something akin to a sovereign state. No one knows you are going up there, and no one knows if you ever come back down.

The lift doors open, and all I am greeted with is another door adorned with a simple rainbow. The Sign of Stefan, says an awed voice in my head. As I have been told, I press my palm against the rainbow and it lights up, one rung at a time—green yellow blue pink—and I feel a slight warmth through my skin. The door slides away, and I come face-to-face, unbelievably, with the man himself.

Stefan smiles at me, his dark eyes softening like juicy raisins. His teeth are brilliantly white and perfectly uniform; they are reams of freshly opened paper. He wears a simple black tracksuit, his body creating unusually square shapes from within its velour confines. Looking closer, I realise his body is actually impossibly boxlike, and that instead of feet, little casters roll hummingly on the pink carpet. The square Stefan moves his mouth, and a recorded voice comes from it: Welcome to The Bell End. Please step this way. Then Square Stefan’s right arm extends in a whirring “greetings and kindly proceed in the direction I am offering” motion and I step past him, my nose curling with the acrid waft of computer hardware slightly overheating. His face, closer up, is obviously prosthetic, but believable nonetheless.

Square Stefan shows me through yet another door, and it opens into a huge round room covered in wood-finish wallpaper, mood-lit in places with orange wall lights shaped like upturned seashells. The centre of the room is engulfed with the virtuosic shimmer of an illuminated lap-pool, complete with bejewelled lane markers and a golden childproof gate all around its edge. My eyes, accustomed as they are to the dark lift-ride up the shaft, feel almost violated by this assault of colour and pattern.

“It is half-Olympic,” says a voice behind me, smooth like a Siamese cat being guided the right way through satin.

I turn around to see what I assume must be the real Stefan, his eyes and teeth do the same raisin/paper trick, but this time, his body is definitely human; I am made almost painfully aware of this by the generous expanse of humanity exposed by Stefan’s loosely gathered kimono. He walks towards me, and I have to avert my eyes from the indistinct fleshy forms that appear from behind swaying silk hemlines.

“The pool, I mean,” says Stefan. “It is exactly half the official Olympic size.”

“I see,” I say.

Stefan turns to Square Stefan and claps his hands, quickly and up beside his shoulder like a Flamenco dancer. “Halstef, bring us some refreshments!”

Halstef turns on his tiny wheels and exits the room. I am left with the real Stefan, and the sound of a water filter ticking over somewhere above me.

“Halstef is my personal assistant,” explains Stefan, spreading his stance unnecessarily wide. “He was made in my image so as not to frighten any guests.”

I nod my head. The heat from the pool begins to make sweat prickle in my collar. I notice a laminated list of rules pinned to the side of the pool fence. One is No Hair Below the Waterline.

“But enough idleness,” says Stefan, finally wrapping the kimono back around himself. “You have been asked here for a reason, and that reason should wait no longer. This way, please.” Stefan motions towards a pair of extended reclining pool seats positioned against the opposite wall. I follow him and attempt to sit down in the chair, but as soon as I have leant my weight down on it, I slip involuntarily into a lying down position, my legs splayed out on the footrest and my eyes staring straight at the ceiling. Worryingly, a reflected image of myself looks back down at me. The ceiling of the room is one large mirror.

Stefan makes a satisfied noise as I watch his reflection ease into his chair. “So much more relaxing than a boardroom,” he observes, “don’t you think?”

“Must be,” I say, struggling to sit upright.

“Had them made especially.” Stefan taps a small plaque at the side of his chair. A modern purple font proclaims Another Quality ProstGreat™ Product. Stefan turns on his side and his face suddenly adopts a more serious timbre. “I must ask, Mr Whitman, that we enjoy ourselves, but also that we attend the very serious matter at hand.” The loose pact between physics and decency governing Stefan’s kimono collapses again, and I look away, mentally adding industrial strength eye-drops to an emergency shopping list. “Mr Whitman,” says Stefan. “I was wondering if you’d be kind enough to hold out your hand.”

I do so, hesitantly.

Stefan reaches into a pocket in his kimono and draws out a handful of crackly, brown matter, scrunching and breaking between his fingers like burnt paper. He transfers it to my hand, and I realise they are broken up old leaves.

“What would you say this is, Mr Whitman?”

“Broken up old leaves?”

“Precisely. I have to say, I had no idea you were as perceptive as you appear to be.”

I pondered Stefan’s statement for a moment, and studied more closely the leaf matter in my hand. It had been well broken-down; it smelt mulchy and honest.

“It arrived in my post office box almost one week ago,” says Stefan. “My private post office box, if you understand.” Stefan gives me a pronounced look. He knows I am not stupid. My position has certainly afforded me certain “sensitive” pieces of information over the years, some of which concerned the truth (or otherwise) about Stefan’s tower. Originally called The Night Companion, and now, officially, The Sky Needle, the tower had long been suspiciously regarded by certain powerful Conservatives as something of a “lighthouse” for illegal activities (due in no small part to the blinding light at the tower’s peak). While there was not a grain of truth among allegations that the tower served as a hub to certain imported substances and devious activities (the light was simply an accessory that did nothing more illegal than confuse incoming passenger planes), the existence of Bell End—and what went on inside it—was nonetheless a piece of information that only a handful shared. All I knew were partially confirmed reports of a “secret society” that met there to make, according to one source, “monumental decisions” for the city. Brisbane was a naturally suspicious place, and the constant presence of armed guards at the base of Stefan’s tower was certainly something that had never sat entirely right with the council, especially those in certain planning departments. Stefan was allowed to keep both his guards and his bulbous hideaway secret because—from the information myself and others had pieced together—this secret society evidently made decisions that those in very high positions of power valued immensely.

Stefan nervously smooths down his hair. I say smooths down, but really, despite a nervous hand passing through them, not one jet-black strand shifts out of place.

“I woke one morning and the package was here,” Stefan motions towards a drinks trolley beside his chair, “with these . . . leaves. Whoever delivered it would have had to have passed through the guards, the elevator, the rainbow access pad⎯even Halstef.”

“But why full of leaves?” I ask. “Why would someone go to all this trouble just to give you broken leaves?”

Stefan leans back in his chair, hands clasped behind his sculpted coif, body splayed open with scant kimono covering. “That, Mr Whitman, is a longer story. One I cannot, perhaps, convincingly convey.”

“What do you mean?” I say to a point well beyond Stefan’s freshly bared shoulder.

Stefan licks his lips uncertainly. “If I were to tell you the whole story,” he says, “I’m afraid you would not believe me. In fact, it is highly likely you would immediately get up and leave the poolside without enjoying any form of refreshment, and you would go back out that door, and as you are travelling back down my shaft, you would think to yourself: That Stefan, he is most probably crazy.”

“Surely not.”

“But you will begin to understand only by seeing it for yourself.” Stefan reaches enthusiastically into the confines of his kimono. I instinctively try to leap out of my chair, but the patented ProstGreat design only makes me fall back into a state of further prone-ness (I can see the billboards in my head: Even When a Swarthy Reclusive Millionaire Reaches Deep into His Personal Crevasses Right Next To You, You’ll Still Want to Lie Back in Comfort!). With my mind prepared for the worst sort of horror, I am relieved when Stefan’s hand emerges with nothing more than an expensive looking manila envelope.

“In this envelope is an address.” Stefan’s face darkens again, and I half expect TV-weather-report lightning to begin zigzagging from his storm cloud bouffant. “You will go to this address, and you will begin to understand why I am so deeply concerned, and why I have chosen you to help.”

I hear a whirring noise.

“Drinks?” says Stefan. “Nibbles?” His features have suddenly returned to those of a jovial host who always has his robot servant deliver his guests a silver platter piled with an artistically designed structure made of Pringles and pate de foie gras.

Halstef trundles towards us, holding the finger-food sculpture (it appears to be a comestibled recreation of the Temptation of Christ) with a specially designed suction attachment on his left hand, while somehow lancing four olives onto two toothpicks with his right.

“I assume you like martinis,” grins Stefan. “Shaken, not stirred, of course.” He laughs loudly at this joke, throwing his head back so fast that his crown of gravitationally independent hair appears, for a moment, to be existing in its own dimension. I suddenly picture him as a little boy in a sepia-toned family portrait, standing, sailor-suited, beneath the parental gaze of Rene Rifkin and Liberace.

This Stefan, I think to myself, he is most probably crazy.

>He woke on a risty morning, rising from his bouch, slowly rubbing the slears from his eyes. His face, he was concerned to find, was slightly moist with speep. He padded down the horridor to the bathroom, turning on the hold tap and jumping straight in the shath. A quick shinse, a scrub with soisteriser, running some shanditionor through his hair, and he was done. Back in the bedroom, he quickly put on a pair of trants, slipped on a shumper and went to the kitchen. A nice cup of decoffee was soon on the boil. He sipped it while making broast with bargarine. There was an empty packet of grultanas on the bench, so he snacked on them too. It was going to be a gine day.

>From being everything, the sky slips too easily into nothing. It makes us die a little, I know—all of us—as we lose the horizon. We wake one morning, and the day and night have gone. They are now just arbitrary measurements, relative to nothing.

On this so-called morning, the 15th day of our voyage, we have lost our sense of identity. There is nothing, now, for us to frame ourselves against. We rely on manufactured points of reference; a magnet against which we plot our path; these maps spread like hope across entire cabin floors; using time and blind deduction where we would have once used our eyes. The grey-white stretches out forever, or perhaps just as far as we can see.

I am fortunate to have suffered this fate a number of times, and even though I know I can survive it, this does not make any difference each time it begins. At first, I think the ship is creaking—pressed between two muscled waves, then I realise it is the dogs, below my feet, howling low and strange. It is no wonder, the blind captives we have made them. This canine moan will be a sound we will learn to regard as natural, as the wind whipping our hair against our ears, as the pillow-snap of sails: another frequency with which to contend. A body’s rhythms change on such a journey: normality broken, collapsing back against each other, like ill-met waves before a storm.

And so I am first to-decks this morning, and I do not blame any other human head for remaining longer than usual under blankets; the urge to remain within dreams, or the darkness of your eyelids, is as strong as any drug when the alternative is a morning such as this. Sleep, now, is a vanishing world, but one in which you can at least feel safe.

My fingers stretch deep within my greatcoat, and I move—just for the sake of moving—across the grain of the rear deck. For the next five months, this sixty square feet of timber will be my observable world. It is far worse to remain rooted to your cabin bunk than to be up here experiencing something at least different to what you would on land. To many, they try to replicate, in their quarters, the exact conditions to which they are accustomed in their bedroom or their study in their own houses. This is not travel—this is ignorance. No matter how trying the circumstances, travel is an experience to be savoured, not an inconvenience to be endured. It is not as if every one of us on this voyage did not know, from the very earliest mentions of its planning, what we were to expect should we agree to join.

>The siren starts at three in the morning. We step bleary-eyed from our houses, arms tied behind us in figure eights. None of us have ever seen the sky quite as red.

Pink moon, observes our neighbour.

Dogs rush past our legs, howling. The fir trees seem lit up like a sports field. A baby cries, and we begin to shiver.

Our neighbour collapses. My wife grips my arm with impossible strength.

He’s dead, she says.

Lower body fat, I tell her.

Is that why we had a midnight snack?

Could be, I say, watching a dog’s jaw dislocate from pain.

>It became slightly worrying for Nora when she found a coffin in Clem’s toolshed: a polished mahogany casket sitting among the wood shavings on the workbench. However, it was only after she found Clem inside the coffin that she voiced her concerns. When Nora asked him what he was doing inside a coffin, Clem explained that he had borrowed it from the funeral parlour. He said he was trying to get a feel for the right size, and had she seen the price of caskets lately?

Nothing more was said of the incident until after dinner, when Clem and Nora were sitting in the living room, watching television. Clem asked Nora for the Yellow Pages. What did he need the Yellow Pages for, she inquired. Clem replied that he was looking for a burial plot with a southerly aspect and didn’t really know where to start. Nora got up from her chair, walked over to the dining room table, and packed away their delicately poised game of afternoon Scrabble. Then she went upstairs without so much as a goodnight. When Clem came to bed half an hour later, he didn’t even ask what the matter was. If he had though, Nora would have replied, I think you know very well what the matter is, before turning her back on him.

The next day, Nora went out to buy bread and milk, trying to forget about the incidents of the previous day. He’s just bored, thought Nora, he just needs a hobby, like stamp collecting. She was so caught up in her own thoughts that she almost ran straight into Mary from the florist’s. It’s the strangest thing, explained Mary to Nora, your Clem hasn’t said a word to me for all the years I’ve known him, and then he comes in and asks about the best time of year for fresh jasmine. What on earth for, asked Nora. Said he wanted to get his timing right, said Mary, whatever that meant.

When Nora got home, she discovered Clem on the living room floor, surrounded by all his old records. Finally, thought Nora, he’s found something to do that doesn’t involve coffins. Clem looked up at her. I think I’ve got it narrowed down, he said. Either Chopin or Sinatra. Don’t want to be too depressing, but Tristesse is such a beautiful piece. Not that I’ll be around to enjoy it, he added with a grin. Nora bit her lip and asked Clem if he wanted a cup of tea. Clem said yes, but added that he had moved the tea into a Tupperware container. When Nora begrudgingly asked why, Clem explained that he thought it would be a nice touch to use the tea caddy rather than an urn, to show he had a sense of humour.

Why on earth, said Nora to Clem, do you keep going on about this morbid rubbish? Clem told her that he was simply planning ahead, to sort out arrangements for his death, when it should come. Which would probably be next September. What on earth makes you think you’ll die next September, asked Nora. Well, replied Clem, how am I supposed to sort out both our arrangements without at least four months’ preparation? Both our arrangements? repeated Nora. That’s right, said Clem, it’s not a small job. I’ve got to cancel the newspapers and talk to the pension office and I haven’t even started thinking about fixing that leaky gutter yet. And you still haven’t told me how you want your side of proceedings to go. They don’t have to be the same I suppose, but it would be nice, wouldn’t it?

Nora stood silent for some moments, considering this development. Clem went back to his records, happily sorting them into small piles. Nora retired quietly to the kitchen to make his lunch. Maybe he was right, she thought. Maybe it was useless waiting for the inevitable. Maybe now was the right time to start planning. She took down a box of rat poison from the top of of the fridge, and stared at it for what seemed like a lifetime.

>If you approached the scene, say, from above, spiralling down as if you had an expensive camera crane, you’d see the epic swirl of sorghum and you’d think not of westerly winds but of all those ghosts chasing patterns through the stalks. Certainly, on this sort of day, with the sky a sparse unbroken blue, nothing seems to be hidden in the air. The only explanation is something invisible, as strange as this seems.

But nowhere else is a vampire running, hustling, running through a wheatfield. He turns blindly this way and that, snaking from unseen captors, a parasol held wildly above his head. His shirt, his tartan cotton button-down, swings wildly about him, heavy with sweat. His pulse cracks loudly through his head, fistfuls of blood pulsing, circling and trading rhythms with his ragged breath.

Through the vampire’s shaken vision, glimpsed flickeringly through wheat-stalks, is the green promise of the woods beyond. He pushes on, stagger-running with hollow legs, fortuitously tripping as a dark stripe whirrs past his face. He throws himself to the ground and the cackle of nine more arrows hail over him. Their sharp speared tips glint in slow-motion in the perfect sun before thudding staccato beats into dirt. The vampire curses to himself. He senses more arrow-shadows screaming black through the wheat before their silver spits punch the soil towards him and he rolls quickly to his left, springing to his feet, jamming his conspicuous parasol under his arm and sprinting towards the edge of the field. His face begins to shred in the full light of the sun and he stifles his breath to a gasp, bending his head frantically down towards his chest. Just as he is ready to collapse, his body explodes from the wheat-maze as a mad dog would from a harness and he sprints the precious few yards to the dark haven of the forest.

The vampire dodges welcome mossy rocks, clambers over fibrous tree stumps, fighting for breath. The midday light has hardly made it down through the branch canopies. The vampire collapses to his haunches, clenched fists sinking deep into the leaf mulch, nostrils gratefully breathing earthy, cool air. He knows he cannot fall asleep, though this is all he wants to do, all—it seems to him now—that he has ever wanted to do. He places his soil stained fingers against his cheek. The sun has made tracks through his skin, turning it rotten and hot. He rises slowly to his feet, turning around to peer back the way he has come. They are still out there, he thinks to himself. They are never going to go rest.

>1. Derryn Hinch

2. David Hinchcliffe

3. David Copperfield

4. Mitch Pileggi (who played Deputy Commissioner Skinner on The X-Files, and who hosted a show called Magic’s Greatest Secrets Revealed)

5. Hank Azaria (who does voices on The Simpsons, where Principal Seymour Skinner is a character, albeit one voiced by Harry Shearer)

6. Azaria Chamberlin

7. Wilt Chamberlin

8. Walt Disney

9. Daffy Duck

10. Wayne Swan

11. Tony Lockett (who played for the Syndey Swans)

12. Tony Soprano

13. Dame Kiri Te Kanewa (who was a soprano)

14. Duke Ellington

15. Paddington Bear

16. Mr Curry (Paddington Bear’s Next Door Neighbour)

17. Christopher Currie.

>In which computers turn against you.

In which the cursor still skews sideways, even though you’ve pressed command-I again to get out of italics, so the cursor should really be looking normal, blinking in a nice straight vertical line, but clearly it’s not.

In which your font always turns to Palatino, thanks to a default setting two computers ago, when you try to tidy up the end of your word document by getting rid of that final, redundant return space.

In which the only part of your desktop picture, carefully picked, is that thin slice that appears to the right of iTunes.

In which American spelling is all that is accepted, even when you go into Dictionary Preferences and change it to English (Aus) for the fiftieth time.

In which you can constantly smell something burning every time you open your laptop screen.

In which you’re pretty sure you’re getting an electric shock through your wrist.

In which you do actually send an error report to Apple.