The Town by Shaun Prescott

Author:Shaun Prescott [Shaun Prescott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571345632
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2018-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

Weeks later I found Ciara in an undercover car park. She was trapping cassette tapes under windscreen wipers, tossing them into ute trays, and wedging them under front tyres. It was a late Sunday afternoon, and fewer than half-a-dozen vehicles were parked in the underground complex.

Ciara flinched when I approached, and then we exchanged hellos. She asked how Rob was going. I told her he wanted to become a drug addict. He might as well, she said.

For the first time I noticed lines beneath her eyes. She had not bothered to brush her hair or do up her shoe laces, and she moved dispassionately, hunched from one chore to the next. She sat on the bonnet of a Holden station wagon and lit a cigarette.

She told me she didn’t know why she bothered with the tapes anymore. No one wrote to her. No one ever called the station. There was no one in the town except her.

I told her that wasn’t true. I was there. Her breaking up with Rob was no reason for us to stop being friends, because Rob was an idiot anyway. It was a surprise to me that she had bothered with him at all, I said, but it would have been inappropriate for me to say so before. Now you’re free to find someone better, or to find no one at all, and in the meantime I could be someone to spend time with. I could even help you make contact with the mysterious keyboard musicians, and with our efforts combined we would surely find them. There are mysterious people everywhere, I said, making strange keyboard music in their homes, probably right at that moment. I didn’t believe it, but it must have been true. Ciara’s chaotic flat had confirmed it.

Ciara said it was impossible for the tapes to have come from the town. After all, she knew everything about the town. She even knew who owned all the vehicles in the car park we were right then sitting in. This one belongs to Denise, she said, tapping on the Holden’s bonnet. Denise who works at the Subway.

She placed a neat tower of three cassette tapes on Denise’s roof and lumbered on.

She might as well stop doing the tapes and her radio show, she said. It would be much more sensible to get married to Rob and have some babies. If she did that she would be so busy that she’d stop hoping to find secrets in the town. Maybe then its familiarity would be a comfort instead of maddening. The town was just there and that was that. It was a bunch of people living in houses who all just get by. I should just get by, she said.

Ciara was only repeating what I had been led to believe many months previous: that there was nothing special in the town. Nothing ever happened in it to warrant the attention of anyone else. Assess the matter closely, and it wasn’t logically possible to be proud of the town, nor upset about it.

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