Think Tank by Bruce Costello It began with a champagne breakfast.
Afterwards, the twelve thinkers sat in a semi-circle, hands behind heads, eyes on the Minister
of Health. The morning sun streamed into the room, illuminating a fish tank in which goldfish
swam in endless circles, or pressed their vacant faces against the glass, staring out,
opening and shutting their gobs. “Thank you all for coming,”
the Big Man said, standing and reading slowly from a tablet, his fancy business shirt barely
containing the belly that flowed over a belt extended to the last hole. “Mental health
reform should seek to increase access to mental health care across the nation, deliver
it in timely manner, efficiently and effectively, and identify and disseminate evidence-based
practices to improve consumer outcomes.” He looked up and swept the
room with his politician’s eyes before continuing. “This Think Tank we have assembled
here today brings together a broad range of expertise to pursue excellence in mental health
policy. You are all without exception experts. Your thoughts are exceedingly important
to the government. So welcome to you all.” He smiled and for a moment looked almost
human. “Now over to you guys to toss some ideas about. Sorry I can’t stay.
I’ll hand you over to your esteemed colleague Dr Hamish Bacon representing the College
of Psychiatrists, who has kindly agreed to chair the meeting.” ** Dr Bacon, who had drunk three glasses of champagne over breakfast and
whose neighbor Mrs Jones had recently died, staggered to his feet. “Who would like to speak
first?” he called out, after rapping on the desk for silence. “One at a time,
please.” He plonked back into his seat, aware of being rather tipsy, hoping nobody
would notice. The Think Tank erupted into life and soon speech bubbles filled the
room. Dr Bacon could actually see them. Dribbling down chins. Ricocheting around the walls.
Bouncing off the ceiling. Buzz words puffing out their chests, oozing pseudoscience. And
lengthy professional terms reeking of scholarship – like cognitive-behavioural,
psychoanalytically-oriented, psychopharmacological and biopsychosocial. ‘Brown words, all of them.
Blah blah blah,’ Dr Bacon said to himself, gazing at the fish tank and thinking of
the deceased Mrs Jones. ‘We are born. We struggle through life and then we die. What’s
it about? And what’s the use of words? We know nothing but think we do, say one thing,
do another and lie about the truth. And who cares? Blah blah blah. Rah de rah de rah. Did
I say that out loud? Nobody’s looking at me - I can’t have. Or maybe I did
and nobody heard. Everybody talks. Nobody listens. And this room’s like an oven with
sunlight pouring in and I’ve got a head like a pneumatic drill and I’m meant
to be chairing this bloody meeting. How do I get them to shut up and speak one at a time?
Dr
Bacon looked around. The Manager from the Ministry of Social Welfare with earrings like
bicycle wheels was opening and shutting her scarlet lips with supersonic rapidity. The
President of the Psychologists Guild was punching the air with his fists, and shouting
about this or that, causing his ponytail to swing wildly. And the Vice President of the
Counselors’ Association (apparently standing in for the President who was having
a mental health day) had issues coming out of her ears, all crying out for vociferous expression. But to rap on the desk...to
call the meeting to order...to stand and challenge the onslaught of words...to take charge?
A chainsaw started up inside Dr Bacon’s mind and the room grew giddy around him.
He clasped his head in his hands and his face slumped to the desk. ** He wanted to stand. He wanted to shout: “Stuff
your stupid evidence-based systemic approaches, your endless theoretical constructs, your
long, learned words, your intellectual formulations and your statistically-proven best
practice treatment methods.” He wanted to shout these things at
the top of his voice and overturn his desk with a great crash and run from the room. Or - the thought suddenly occurred
to him - he could do the professional thing...insist on silence... then
calmly share with the meeting what he’d learned from his personal therapeutic encounters
with the loving Mrs Jones, a woman of short words, who’d never stepped foot inside
a university. The loving woman he’d always turned to when his soul was troubled...who
looked at him quietly with gentle eyes...saw every quiver on his face and heard every word
he said or didn’t say...who listened to him with her ears, her eyes and her heart...who
discerned the buried secrets of his soul and restored his belief in himself. Dr
Bacon stood up, swaying, an impressive figure with a bushy beard and a red face with swollen
eyelids through which glinted red eyes. And it seemed to him that
nothing was real anymore. Nothing. HE wasn’t real, the people before him weren’t
real, just a two-dimensional collection of pretentious gits who knew everything and doubted
nothing, opening and shutting their gobs, talking crap words, listening to nobody, their
academic brains no more capable of understanding the human mind than goldfish were of swimming
to the sun. And the sun would rise tomorrow and Mrs Jones would still be dead. There was only one thing to
do and Dr Bacon did it. He upended his desk with a great crash. In the silence that followed, Dr Bacon
tiptoed to the fish tank, picked up a pottle left lying alongside, and sprinkled a little
fish food on the surface of the water. He watched the fish rise, googly-eyed and gaping,
and he gazed for a time at a stream of bubbles gurgling up from the bottom. Then Dr Bacon
turned to enjoy the shocked stillness behind him, where the others, like stunned cod, were
gawking at him in a silence as thick as aquarium glass. He
walked over to the President of the Psychologists’ Guild, emptied the pottle of
fish food on his ponytailed head and departed.
Weird World Bruce Costello Feet on
the coffee table, hands on the windowsill, a shaggy dog is conversing with the moon.
Hearing human noises, he leaps down. His young man enters the room with a female person. They’re holding paws.
The dog recognises the female’s body smell from regular inspections of his
man’s clothes and hands, though she’s obviously been trying to disguise her
natural aroma by rolling in stinky female stuff. “So that’s what she looks like,” the dog thinks.
“Oh, you’ve got a mutt!” the female exclaims. “Does it shake
hands?”
The dog brushes past her outstretched arm and sniffs her crotch. She yelps.
“Down, boy!” says the man.
The two humans lick each other for a time and then shut themselves in the bedroom.
The dog returns to the window, which is now wet with condensation. Two blobs of
water slide down the glass collide and merge.
The dog runs to the bedroom door and smells around its edges. He whines, slumps
onto the carpet, stretches out his front paws and lays his head on them. Time
passes, about as long as it takes to eat a bowl of biscuits. He drops off to sleep, but
twitches and cries.
Waking with a start, he hurries into the kitchen, where he’d left a pig’s
ear on the floor. With his snout, he pushes
it into the spidery space between the fridge and the wall.
In the morning, the humans emerge
from the bedroom. The man looks dog-tired, as if he’s been chasing cats all night.
The female struts about like she’s got two tails,
head held high, ears perked up, eyes bright. Says she’s gotta see a dog about
a man, leaves the room, and returns looking mighty pleased with herself. The dog runs to
the kitchen to check on his pig’s ear, but it’s still where he left it amid
the dust and cobwebs.
The female has a thing she calls a bong. She sniffs smoke from it. “Please
don’t,” says the man. “My father was an addict and my mother taught me to hate
that bullshit.”
“Just try it. For me. You’re only young once.” That
day the man stays home. The female remains
at the house for many moons until they start to fight. Then she runs away and doesn’t
come back. The man gets his own bong, gives up going out
every morning and mopes around the flat with a hang-dog look. He stops grooming himself
and hair grows wild all over his face. He won’t take the dog for walks and sometimes
gets very growly.
The dog experiences a spiritual crisis, no longer converses with the moon and
starts peeing inside. Day follows day and night follows night. Something’s not right. The
dog pricks up his ears, sniffs, and runs to his man. Water is falling from the man’s
eyes and over his face. It’s like rain, but tastes different. The man is making strange
noises. He tells the dog his mother has died. The dog nuzzles into him and that night returns
to his rightful place in the man’s bed.
More days, more nights. There’s a knocking at the
door. A young woman is there with kind brown eyes and a gentle smell. The dog stares at
her, head cocked to the side, tail thumping against the porch wall.
“Oh, hullo, Pooch. Just thought I’d pop around to see if Peter’s
alright. We miss him at work, you know.”
“I’m fine!” the man shouts. “Bugger off.” The
dog seems to shake his head. His tail quivers, and then curls between his legs.
“Thanks, fella,” the woman whispers, ruffling the dog’s head. She
calls out: “I’m worried about you, Peter,” and enters the flat.
The man is sitting on the sofa. The dog leaps onto his lap and looks expectantly
at the young woman, his big brown eyes glowing through straggly eyebrows.
“They do say people grow to resemble their dogs,” the young woman jokes.
She sniffs the air, and looks from dog to man, and from man to dog, as if she can’t
tell one from the other.
The man’s face cracks a smile.
The humans talk and talk, slowly at first, with grunts and silence from the man,
and softness from the woman. Then words start to fall fast and loud from the man, like
biscuits into a bowl. The dog hurries to the kitchen to retrieve his pig’s ear. He
wolfs it down,
and returns to the sofa, but gets bored with talk talk and goes to his place by the window.
The sky is dark. The dog lifts his head and bays, then watches as the clouds
scamper off and the moon appears, big, bright and odourless. It winks at the shaggy dog
and frowns down disapprovingly on the human world.
The
end.
A Case of Paracosm Bruce Costello When my estranged son heard a cardiologist had given me three
months to live, he paid me a visit, the first in forty years. He moved my single bed into the sunroom
looking out over the harbor and here I spend my last days, gazing across the grey water
to the grey hills with their dismal shroud of winter cloud. I can still get up to the loo, but the
effort tires me, so I always wait till I’m busting and sometimes don’t quite
make it. I
live alone and see few people. The meals-on-wheels lady comes daily. The district nurse
comes fortnightly. A caregiver woman comes for half an hour each afternoon. A few friends
and old colleagues drop by occasionally and try to cheer me up, but they piss me off with
their hail-fellow-well-met joviality, and I’m rude to them, so they’ve mostly
stopped coming. Except for one old buddy who brings my whisky. I must admit I like a drink
now and then. More now than then, to tell the truth. My son stopped coming after he asked about his inheritance,
and I told him everything was going to the Salvation Army. He muttered something under
his breath and took off—discarded me for the second time. At least his mother, my
third wife, only discarded me once. I’ve often thought that dying would be easier than living, but I’m
not so sure now. The
idea of death frightens me, but life confuses me. Half the time I don’t know whether
I’m Arthur or Martha, whether I’m coming or going, what’s fiction and
what’s truth, what’s fact and what’s fantasy, who you can trust and who
you can’t trust. My only safe place is the space inside my head. But there’s one doctor who visits me quite often that I really
love: Denise Donaldson. She’s not my own doctor, just somebody I knew before she
became a doctor. I’ll tell you about Denise shortly. I don’t think I’m afraid of actually being dead. At worst, it will feel like it did before I was conceived. And
at best… well, I often think of Virginia, my mother’s younger cousin, who died
decades ago with a serene smile on her face and a Bible in her hand. These days, I think
about Virginia a lot. Apart from Denise and Virginia, I can’t think of anyone
else I’ll regret leaving behind when I die. Basically, after a lifetime of people, I’ve had a gutful.
People wear me
out with their expectations, their demands and manipulations, their brutality when they
don’t get their own way. But I often daydream about Virginia and imagine her hand on
my forehead, like when she lived with us when I was a boy, and I suffered severely
from asthma. I’d
wake up in the night, wheezing and gasping, couldn’t breathe, and Virginia would
always calm me down with her gentle touch, as not even my mother could. Sometimes I wish I were a little
boy again and often I actually feel like I am one, though the reality is, I’m over
80. I think I’m going soft in the head. But I must tell you about Denise, my doctor friend. When I was in hospital for my last dose of surgery, Denise
happened to walk past my bed to see one of her patients. She recognized me at once, though
she hadn’t seen me since her high school days, thirty years before, when I was her
form teacher and she was a right little so-and-so. We chatted for a while and when I got out of hospital she turned
up at my place one day and started to visit frequently. I enjoyed her coming, because she was lovely to me and I could
talk to her about anything—not just about the weather, but about the important life
and death stuff. She was not into airy-fairy reassurances and glossing over of realities.
She was just what I needed. And somehow I thought she needed me as well. There was a loneliness about
her, a particular flavour of sadness. She never talked about her private life. At least, not directly. Once when I was telling her about my third wife, Denise quoted
that famous Russian writer, Anton Chekhov, who famously said: “If you are afraid
of loneliness, don’t get married,” and she laughed, as if it were a great joke,
then fell silent. “It’s
just so unfair, what’s happening at home,” she blurted out, after a while,
the words just sliding from her lips. And the look on her face! I wanted to reach out and
touch her, but you don’t do that when you’re an old man or people might think
you’re a dirty old man. Anyway, she resumed chatting and stayed for longer than normal, as if
reluctant to leave. When she finally stood up to go, she hugged me long and hard. I asked
what she’d meant by that quotation, but she just laughed. Anton Chekhov, she told me, was always just joking around. The same writer who said,
when somebody asked him how he was feeling, “I feel like a donkey, with a stick in
my mouth and a carrot up my arse.” Denise was laughing as she walked out the door and I could still hear
her laughter as she walked down the path. * A week later the district nurse tells me that Denise is dead. I ask her what happened,
but she can’t or won’t tell me, and it’s obvious to me she’s making
it all up for some reason. She’s lying. Denise can’t be dead - that’s
unthinkable. And
sure enough, Denise’s visits resume. She reappears in my room about a week later,
sits on the bed and talks to me as if she’s never been away. After that, she starts
turning up any time of the day or night and next thing I know, she’s living with
me. She sits beside
me during the day and at night she slips out of her clothes and slides into my bed. It’s
no big deal. We cuddle all night and that’s all we do. It’s the best relationship I’ve
ever had. No sidetracks. No tangents. No kids. No marital minefields. No expectations.
No social life. No sex. Nothing to go wrong. I tell her about me, and she opens up and tells me about her.
We talk about who we are, what we think about life and how we feel about each
other. We talk about crappy things from our pasts, shake them around, toss them about,
then forget about them. We live in the present tense. And then, would you believe it, Virginia, my mother’s cousin, who
used to babysit me, Virginia whom I’d thought had been dead for decades, turns up
out of the blue, looking soft and serene, just like I remembered her from when I was a
kid. I introduce her
to Denise and the two get on really well, like best sisters. Virginia is at a loose end
in her life and has nowhere to stay, so Denise suggests we ask her to move in with us.
Virginia accepts instantly. The pair set about tidying my room. They start by taking down
the musty old net curtains and cleaning the windows inside and out. Light and colour start
to pour into the room and this makes such a difference. And now with my two favourite women caring for me, I start to
feel better. My health is returning. I think it’s probably the district nurse who arranges for the cardiologist
to call around and check me out. A tall American wearing a bow tie, sunglasses tucked in
his top pocket, he is gobsmacked to find my heart is on the mend, that I’m actually
going to live. “It’s
a miracle,” he says. “Fantastic. How did you manage that?” “I’ve been well
looked after,” I say. “There’s nothing to equal
the curative love of a good woman and when there’re two of them in your bed, you’re
on a winning streak. “Well, whatever you’re doing, and however you’re doing it,”
the cardiologist says, raising his eyebrows, “keep doing it.”
A EULOGY Bruce Costello I was the first newspaper journalist
you’d ever met, you told me, and you’d thought all newspaper journalists were
men! I explained you’d just become the world’s most famous 100-year-old woman,
so naturally our readers wanted to know about your life, and I was fortunate to be the
journalist the newspaper sent to interview you, a month before the launch into space. Once the interview
got underway, you began to relax and to open up. Back
in your early days, you told me, life was simple. It
was about riding your bike to school, mucking around with other kids, and catching tadpoles
in the creek. Life wasn’t
about death. People didn’t really die. Or if they did, it was just some old person
you’d never heard of, like Dad’s uncle Albert, Mum’s cousin Freda or
whoever. You couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. You went to
school, came home, played and scrapped with the other kids, skited about how many tadpoles
you’d caught, or looked for four-leaf clovers on the front lawn with the girl from
over the road. At Sunday
School you learned to recite the Ten Commandments off by heart. One year you even won a
prize. Your Mum stayed
home most days and did the housework. When you got home from school, she was baking scones
in the kitchen, stoking the fire or darning Dad’s socks. Dad rode
his bike to the factory and wore bicycle clips on his trouser legs. When he got home from
work, he’d sit on the back doorstep to take his boots off. Clodhoppers he called
them. You were all
smiles talking about your childhood, but when we got onto your adult years it was a different
story. Your Mum and
Dad died within weeks of each other. Not long afterwards, you got married to a steady
sort of a chap you met at a dance who’d saved up and bought his own car. Then, when war came, he was called
up and sent overseas. Two years
fighting Germans in the Western Desert and another year as a prisoner of war changed him
from the love of your life to someone you barely knew … but you stuck with him. You
stood by your man but at what cost! Eight years
of screaming nightmares and boozing. You stuck with him, all in vain as it turned
out, because he shot himself eventually. And the shame of his suicide fell on you. People
can be so cruel, you whispered, and you turned your face from me to hide the tears. There was something
about your great age and your experience of being a woman that highlighted an emptiness
in my own life. You’d
lived life to the full, loved and cried a lot, but boy could you laugh! Peals of silver,
like the moon laughing through gaps in thunder clouds. And
you enjoyed living in the rest home. It was the best
time of your life, such an easy existence with built-in friends, staff to take care of
every need, and you didn’t even have to help with the dishes. But it was also the
worst time of your life, because you had time to reflect on the past and experience the
sadness you’d been too busy to feel while it was happening. After
your husband died, you kept yourself going. You had
a daughter to live for, and you did. There were no hand-outs in those days. You got a job
cleaning motels and worked yourself silly. By the time you were middle-aged, your hair
was white, and your face was wrinkled. You put your daughter through High School and got
her into Teachers College, although it meant you had to take on a second job. You saved your
pennies and paid for her wedding, then helped her through the trauma of divorce a few years
later after the sod took off with another woman. When your daughter
had a nervous breakdown, you took over the care of her three children. One of them got
pregnant at the age of thirteen, and you adopted the baby yourself – that was baby
Merrilyn, the great granddaughter who, as a young teenager, entered you in the world-wide
contest that you won, which made you famous around the globe. Your name went
into a big electronic hat sort of a thing along with the names of thousands of other 100-year-old
women from around the world and it was drawn on live TV by the President of the United
States. A publicity stunt for him but what a prize for the winner! You won the chance
to be the first 100-year-old woman in space … to rocket skywards from Cape Canaveral
and orbit the planet five times. You would be the only passenger on board, escorted by
the richest man in the world flying in his own spacecraft with two flight crew and a flight
attendant to see to your every need. You knew there were some risks but that was alright. You were informed
you might die if anything went wrong, but what the heck. You
knew about death now. All your friends had been through
it … you knew it was nothing to fear. You had heard Henry Scott-Holland’s poem
so often at funerals, you knew it off by heart. Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only
slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it
was. I am I, and you are you. And so on. “Think of it,” Merrilyn
said, when she told you you’d won the draw. “Age is just a number. Do it for womankind.
Show the world what women are made of.” “Righto,
dear,” you said. And
what a trip it was … flying to Florida in the
United States then travelling by coach and limousine to Cape Canaveral, cheering crowds
lining the streets, TV cameras everywhere. Through the week of safety training, then through
the countdown, the launch, the broadcasts
from space, your face was radiant with delight, beaming into millions of TV sets the
world over, your silver peals of laughter echoing through the universe. On the fifth orbit, the crew
captain informed you something had gone wrong with the heat shield, making safe re-entry
impossible. He explained the spaceship was doomed to keep circling the earth, and everybody
aboard would die when the oxygen ran out … or the choice could be made to opt for
a quick ending - an attempted re-entry that could finish only in a fiery death. Whether to die
slowly or turn to ashes quickly and painlessly was the choice. The world’s richest
man broke down on live TV, and pouted as he passed the responsibility over to you. You had to choose.
So, what did
you do? You played
scrabble. You
played scrabble with the richest man in the world, and you beat him. 260 points to 106.
Then you made
your decision. And the
last sound the world heard from you was half a peal of silver laughter.
Of Frogs and Men by
Bruce Costello There’s not a
cloud to be seen. The brown grass has a hopeless, despairing look, as if afraid it will
never be green again. The forest is motionless, and seems to be peeping out through its
leaves, expecting something awful to happen. A hawk rises from the almost dry creek that
runs between the railway line and the roadway, a frog dangling from its beak. Mr Lamb is beginning
the journey into town for his annual haircut. His wife has escorted him to the bus stop.
She gives him money to cover the fares there and back, plus $25.00 to pay the barber. She
instructs him to come straight home afterwards, as there’s work to be done around
the farm. Mr Lamb boards the bus and his wife returns home on foot. * At the barber's shop, a radio program is blaring from
a speaker mounted high up a wall. The barber is working on someone’s head while Mr
Lamb and a few other men await their turn on bench seats around the walls. On the radio, a sociologist is being interviewed about
climate change. "Can you
please explain to our listeners what you mean by Boiled Frog Syndrome," the announcer is
saying. "Sure thing,"
replies the sociologist, who sounds like an American wearing a bow tie. "Boiled Frog Syndrome
is based on the demonstrably fallacious notion that, if you place a frog in boiling water,
it'll jump out, but if you place it in cold water and apply heat slowly, the frog will
fail to perceive the danger and will be boiled to death."
"So, ah, it's about not recognising, or failing to deal with a problem, and by the
time you do, it's too late to avert disaster?" asks the announcer. "Exactly, dead in the water," replies the learned
man with a learned chuckle. "The same principle operates in other areas of life,
too, like in relationships, as I expect some of your listeners will know only too well." One of the waiting men, a red-faced fellow with a paunch,
leaps to his feet.
"My bloody oath!” he shouts. “A mate of mine wanted to throw himself
under a train last week but didn’t have the guts to do it. Silly bastard had let
his wife run his life for forty years, and by the time he realised what was happening,
it was too late. The poor bugger. He’d completely lost his mojo. Couldn’t even
do himself in. Bossy bloody women!" "It's
not a gender problem," says the radio announcer,
as if in answer to the fat man. "It's a people problem. It's what people do to
people."
“Yes, indeed,” agrees the sociologist. “And it’s common
in marriages today. The controlling spouse isolates the subordinate spouse and whittles
away at them until they’ve got little left of themselves. It’s destruction
of another person’s individuality, a kind of soul murder, you could say.” The barber quickly turns the radio off as if he’s
heard enough, and knows it all, anyway. He finishes the head he’s been working on,
takes the man’s money and sees him to the door. Mr Lamb is next in line. The barber turns to him.
Mr Lamb is gaping open-mouthed
and wide-eyed at the silent wall speaker, as if a revelation had been delivered to his
head without warning. A thunderbolt from a clear blue sky. The barber helps Mr Lamb into the chair, asking
how his day is going, but he seems not to hear and doesn’t reply. Once seated, Mr
Lamb stares at the mirror on the wall in front of him. His eyes are hardly blinking. They
seem to focus on some distant horizon far beyond the mirror. The
Barber sets to work removing a year’s growth from Mr Lamb’s head. When the
arduous task is completed, he holds out his palm. Mr Lamb drops money in it and runs from
the shop. It is lunchtime. The
footpath is full of people. Mr Lamb
heads in the direction of the bus stop, half walking, half running, with a strange rolling
gait, brushing against others crowding the footpath. They move quickly aside, swearing
and muttering. Mr Lamb appears not to notice. He
wrinkles his brow oddly, like a man with strange thoughts buzzing about
his brain, in the way that blowflies buzz about a poo pile. Perhaps
seeking to escape the swarm, he suddenly enters a tavern, looking about as if he’s
never been in a tavern before. Discerning a bar with a barman, he feels in his back pocket,
finds some money, and buys a beer. Three men
are seated around a table, talking loudly, and laughing. One glances up at Mr Lamb and
pulls out a chair. “Come
and join us, mate.” Mr Lamb
sits at the table and drinks his beer. The three men are talking about fishing, rugby,
and cars. Mr Lamb looks out of place, like someone who doesn’t fish, doesn’t
follow the rugby and doesn’t drive. A bull-headed
man without a neck who looks like a football player asks Mr Lamb whether he’s a Ford
or a Holden man. Mr Lamb opens his mouth, but no words emerge. He looks wildly about the
room. There is
a large TV on the wall. On the screen, Mr Lamb sees his wife. She is seated behind a desk
reading a breaking news item about an atomic bomb exploding over New Zealand and killing
a whole lot of people. Then
he sees his wife leap from the TV onto the floor of the tavern. With
her long-nosed face and her opening and shutting beak , she resembles a terrifying bird
looking for someone to devour. Mr Lamb
throws up his hands in horror as he suddenly realises what he has done. He has spent some
of his bus money on buying a beer. He doesn’t
notice how the other men at the table are now staring at him wide-eyed, nor how the barman
is watching him. He doesn’t see the barman pick up the phone. He doesn’t hear
the siren coming, nor notice how it grows louder and then stops abruptly. He doesn’t
see a paramedic run into the tavern, talk briefly to the barman then approach the table.
But he does look up when the man taps him on the shoulder. The
paramedic has a face like the bum of a baboon and hands the size of baseball
gloves, but Mr Lamb seems reassured by his gentle manner. “You
don’t look too good, Sir. Would you like to come with me, and we’ll find a
quiet space to have a chat? Maybe there is something you will permit me to assist you with.” They drive to the ambulance station and the paramedic
sits Mr Lamb down in a pleasant room, where he finds his voice and the two of them talk
for a while, but not about anything in particular. Mr
Lamb tells the paramedic he has no money to catch the bus home, whereupon
the kind man opens his wallet and passes over a $20 note. Mr Lamb thanks him profusely,
departs and hurries to the bus stop. Half an
hour later, when he disembarks from the bus and is about to begin the short walk back to
the farm, he sees, stomping towards him, the identical huge bird that had terrified him
in the tavern. This time she is breathing fire and making ghastly noises. Fortunately, there’s a train coming from the other
direction, and it looks like the train will arrive first. There is only one thing to do. And Mr Lamb does
it .
* His wife arrives
on the scene just as Mr Lamb’s head, complete with new $25 haircut, flies out from
under a wheel of the train, to splatter against her left leg, completely ruining her nylon
stockings. And
somewhere nearby a frog croaks.
LIFE by
Bruce Costello It began before
birth. Before you entered the world. The stricken
voices. Your mother's frenzy flooding your blood. * Now you are 12
months old with eyes that reflect the fear and confusion you feel. You
know too much. Not
knowing as we grown-ups understand knowing. Knowing for you is unthought. It is instinct, nipple,
shouted word, abusive touch, unmet need, useless yearning. You look around, head revolving like the turret of a
tank on a battlefield. Who
are these? What’s happening? Who can I trust? Who's looking after me? What am I?
What is life? Where’s Mother? Your mother’s breast was warm and squishy sometimes, but
other times it was cold and prickly, and her milk was poison. Who can a girl trust if not her mother’s milk? Mother’s
breast was there, but not there. Always going, never coming. When Mother was there, she
was somewhere else, even before she killed herself. And your little arms thrashed the air, desperate for a grip
on life, but your mind was a primordial mass of unmet needs and torments and there was
no one to hold you. Out
of the desperation came a primal scream, fading to silence, sudden compliance, eerie surrender. * A
new sensation welled up in me as your tiny hand gripped my finger. Long forgotten feelings
surged, overflowed my eyes and spilled from my lips. Now here I am. We’re adopting each other. Grandfather promoted
to Motherhood. You, little Janet, are now mine to nurture and protect. And if I win your trust, you may
learn to trust the world.
In 2010, New Zealander Bruce Costello retired
from work and city life, retreated to the seaside village of Hampden, joined the Waitaki
Writers’ Group and took up writing as a pastime. Since then, he has had 157 short
story successes— publications in literary journals (including Yellow Mama)
anthologies and popular magazines, and contest places and wins.
|