Now Showing (18 page)

Grace touched Simon's shoulder. She rubbed the skin gently then patted him.

Simon looked down at the pistol in his hand. ‘I'm sorry. I can do better than this.' He stepped to the freezer and put it on a packet of frozen crinkle-cut chips. He closed the freezer door firmly. ‘Right, let's forget the gun. Frank, let's forget that I helped you a couple of nights ago. Let's say, I'm a complete stranger, who is in need. I'm asking you for kindness, sir. Let's say, I've asked you for a lift into town and you say, hey, sure.'

Frank never took his eyes off the freezer. He said, ‘Hey, sure.'

The automatic door of Frank's garage wound up and Frank's car, from that first night, eased out into the bright sunshine. Grace was driving. She wore a green tracksuit top. Simon wore Frank's shirt. It was clean and ironed.

Grace turned the car out of the driveway and down the cul-de-sac and out onto the road.

Connectivity: the extent to which components of a network are connected to one another and the speed with which they can converse.

Convergence: the tendency for different technological systems to evolve towards performing similar tasks.

The taxi pulled into the quiet tree-lined cul-de-sac observed by a
Ninox connivens connivens,
commonly known as the barking owl. A dog barked somewhere, but not the owl. It watched Adam emerge from the back of the taxi and go to the popped boot to get out a slightly fire-singed suitcase. Adam was dressed in jeans, a checked shirt and cowboy boots, a little bit too country even for 1991.

‘Wanna shut the boot there, mate?' called the taxi driver.

Adam did, then put the suitcase on the curb next to a neat row of metal rubbish bins. He went to the back seat and got out a covered birdcage and set that down next to the suitcase before going to the driver's window.

‘Forty-four thirty. Make it an even forty-five.'

Adam looked up from his wallet. ‘That's a lot.'

‘There was that detour I explained about and the live animal transporting fee, and you know, now you've seen the city – even went past the museum. Lot bigger than ... where did you say you was from?'

‘Mukinbudin.'

The taxi driver said, ‘Welcome to the big smoke,' as he plucked the fifty from Adam's hand and drove away.

Adam turned to look at the maisonette-style flats. Four flats, two above the two below. There was an ornate entrance way in the middle. ‘Number two, Chris,' he said to the birdcage before picking it up. ‘The key is hidden under the mat. Lovely garden.'

The owl sniffed the air. She thought she smelled canary. She liked canaries. They tasted like chicken. Most things tasted like chicken. Even mice. She barked hopefully.

During the meandering taxi journey through the streets of the city Adam had indeed passed the impressive sandstone museum. Twice. The taxi driver had noted the age of the building and the night lighting of the façade. It had been dark within and still was now, long closed for the day.

Inside, two figures flitted from shadow to shadow. An imposing polished jarrah staircase led up. A threadbare polar bear stood near a toilet door. In a huge room off the other way the plastic replica of a
pterodactyl skeleton shone white in the darkness. The likeness of an
Archaeopteryx
fossil, urvogel, glowed in a cabinet beyond.

Paul crept from beneath the stairs to a computer set on a black velvet– covered stand. He pushed the green plastic button which activated the multimedia program. A poorly lit photograph of the museum appeared on the screen with a superimposed title:
Your Museum.
Music played, neither driving nor particularly inspiring, filling the gaps in the commentary, like instrumental putty. The voice of a local newsreader spoke in a friendly tone. ‘Welcome to your museum.'

‘Can you turn the sound down?' Jane whispered, stepping up behind Paul.

Paul fiddled with a dial but it didn't seem to change anything. He used the arrows on the keyboard to bring up the floor plans of different levels of the museum.

‘You were supposed to have done this already, Paul!'

‘I'm just checking,' he lied.

‘Antiquities – third floor,' she pointed. ‘Come on.'

A photograph of a metal ball came up. It nestled on blue satin. Regal trumpets, muted. ‘One of your museum's most prized possessions is on loan from St Petersburg. The Princess's Ball is a perfect sphere fashioned entirely from gold.'

‘Turn the bloody thing off and let's go,' hissed Jane.

Paul pushed the red plastic stop button but there seemed to still be a few bugs to iron out in the cutting-edge technology of the museum's multimedia display. Drawings of a Wiccan goddess holding a triple moon replaced graphs of the world's rarest metals. The voice kept explaining as Paul put on his balaclava and picked up his very heavy canvas bag and shuffled after Jane.

‘The triple moon of maiden, mother and crone, waxing, full and waning moon, is associated with feminine energy, mystery and psychic abilities.'

Upstairs a guard walked past a large glass cabinet depicting an avian-themed bush scene. There were dead trees full of stuffed birds and a fake waterway with stuffed ducks. A swan sat atop a nest. A dugite lurked. There were eggs everywhere. The guard shone his torch across the dusty little glass eyes until he found his favourite, a pink cockatoo.
‘Polly want a cracker,' he said. ‘Bwark, bwark.' He listened. Somewhere downstairs there was someone talking.

‘With a circumference of seventy centimetres, the Princess's Ball is hollow at its core, but scientists suggest the gold crust to be of two hundred and fifty millimetres in thickness.'

The guard moved carefully down the stairs, his torch at the ready.

Jane and Paul slipped into the Antiquities room as soon as he passed. There were cabinets of special crockery, some weathered clay soldiers, many large vases and urns. In the centre of the room, spotlit, in a protective glass case, surrounded by red alarm beams, lay the golden ball. It was smooth and unadorned. It glowed on the blue satin bed.

Paul opened the canvas bag and picked through intricate cutting devices and complicated electronic measurers.

Downstairs the guard went to the multimedia computer. It was on again, droning its endless trivia. ‘The orb contains seventy ounces of eighteen-carat gold. At today's gold prices, this makes the ball extremely valuable. However, as an artefact, the Princess's Ball is of inestimable value.'

Jane stood by the door, keeping lookout.

Paul examined the electronic beams and the intricate wires leading to the base of the cabinet thoughtfully before taking a sledgehammer out of his bag. He took a deep breath then a full swing. Glass smashed and the cabinet tumbled. The ball fell to the floor with a crack and stuck. It sat there in the dent of broken floorboards like an egg in a wooden nest.

Alarms began to howl. Lights flashed and swept.

Adam woke, panting, to orange light pulsing in the darkness. His first thought was bushfire. He jumped up ready to get water to the hay shed, but he wasn't on the farm anymore. He could hear bangs and clatters outside. There was a metallic grinding noise. A motor.

He went to the window. A huge blue truck with a rotating orange light on top idled and revved in the street as men with big metal
rubbish bins on their shoulders ran to the bins behind a shopping centre, throwing down their lids with more clatters and up-ending them. They wore blue singlets and bandanas but their sweat glistened in the orange light. They wrestled and dragged the metal bins back to the growling truck, its back open and mashing. They hurled abuse at each other and laughed aggressively.

Then Adam saw they weren't all men. One was a woman, although she had the same short army-style haircut, wore the same shorts and sweat-dripping biceps. She emptied a small bin near the flats and tossed it into the brick letterbox next door. She spat from between perfect white teeth.

The truck rumbled on down the hill, its rear closing and squashing with the faintest gurgle somewhere in its guts. The garbos fell in behind, chanting like army grunts in training, ‘Boom chugga lug, boom chugga lug.'

Adam woke, sweating, at dawn, wondering if he had heard more banging noises upstairs. He looked at the ceiling. There were many cracks, like a map of country roads. This was not his room. That was gone. Adam's suitcase lay open on a dressing table. He thought he could hear sawing.

He went to his window and looked out. There were empty bins lying behind the shopping centre, lids scattered. Some paper blew, caught by an easterly. It hovered then drifted towards a tree in the garden.

Adam was dressed for work in a blue short-sleeved shirt and a blue tie. He opened and closed empty cupboards as he explored the furnished but unstocked flat. ‘Did those garbage collectors wake you up last night? The city sure is noisy.'

‘There's a cat! A real brute of a thing. Sat outside the window most of the night, watching me.'

Adam left the kitchen and investigated the adjacent lounge room. There was a couch, chairs and a little desk in the corner. ‘I thought I might get one of those personal computers. You can get CD-ROMS full
of information. A whole encyclopedia. Anything you want to know.'

‘I'm pretty sure I heard an owl too. I was hoping he'd get the cat. Adam, we gotta get outta here.'

On a table in front of the lounge window sat the birdcage. Inside a canary jigged up and down on his perch, agitated.

Adam looked into the canary's plastic feeder box. ‘Chris, you've eaten all your food.'

‘Comfort food. I ate to reduce stress. It didn't work. I'm going through a lot right now.'

‘I'll have to buy some seed on the way home from work.'

‘Hey, not to worry. I'll hunt. Maybe head for the river – plummet out of the sun, and catch some salmon.'

Adam turned around in front of the cage. ‘Well, how do I look? Gotta make a good impression on my first day.'

‘You look like mallee fowl. The female.'

The sawing sound came again from above. Something heavy hit the floor up there, sending a fine spray of plaster down on Adam as he looked up. There were more cracks on the lounge ceiling, some quite big. Adam shook away his feelings of foreboding. ‘I'm going to be late.' He grabbed his keys and his wallet and hurried out.

Chris contemplated the door. ‘Look, I know what you're thinking. Sad, lonely guy who talks to his canary. He wasn't always like this. The fact is I'm all he's got now. By the way, he can't hear me. Sometimes I think he can when I focus hard on food, but mostly we have parallel conversations. It's a species thing, I guess. Anyway, he was happy once.' Chris raised his tail delicately and pooped. ‘Shit happens.'

Adam caught a bus into the city, noting the bright colours the girls wore and their full hair. Young men had full hair too, often dented in the middle by the headphones of their Sony Walkmans. He was about to cross the road to his new workplace when he saw the pet shop. The shop had lots of fish in tanks but also some cages of birds at the back.

There was a girl. She moved through the birdcages, filling each water cup from a little blue watering can with a long curved neck. She had a slender neck too. And long dark hair. She had a small nose and large dark eyes. She moved to another cage and tipped the watering can, like
a dark feathered crane dipping towards a river, completely intent on the end of the water spout.

Adam was about to go in, but caught the reflection of the GPO in the window. He turned and hurried across the road to his new job, his new life, perhaps to be reborn.

As Adam went into the General Post Office, a uniformed postman entered the front door of Adam's flats. He went straight up the internal stairs to the landing, where he knocked on the door of flat three.

The hammering in flat four stopped, but then started again more vigorously.

The door to flat three opened with a flourish. Mary's full figure was barely held by her red underwear and black suspender belt. She wore stockings and high-heeled shoes and held a whip. She was panting.

‘Oh,' said the postman. ‘I'm sorry, Mary. Are you busy?'

‘Practising my swing, Toby.'

‘Ah,' said Toby, looking down at her shoes and losing himself in their angry sharp heels.

‘Toby,' said Mary, firmly. ‘You didn't ring.'

‘I've got a letter, for you. I thought I'd bring it ... straight up.'

Mary softened. ‘Bring it in. We can steam it open together.'

She held open the door and the postman shuffled in. She looked towards the hammering noise.

Underneath flat three was flat number one.

At a small table in the corner of flat one, Jane sat at Paul's personal computer waiting for dial-up to connect her to the stock market. She had recently discovered
Gopher,
an application layer protocol that aided in finding documents from around the world.

Paul sat at the kitchen table, the golden sphere nestling in the canvas bag open at his feet. Paul was taking his long-playing records out of a cardboard box to make room for the Princess's Ball. ‘Are you sure we're doing the right thing, Jane?'

‘Yep.'

‘I know this is an artificially fetishised object arbitrarily designated art by those in power and being owned by the oppressive monarchy lauding its wealth...'

‘Gouged from the oppressed.' Jane was a university student, studying anthropology, sociology and social work.

‘Yeah. But...' Paul was a university student too. He was studying occupational therapy. ‘Isn't it also a symbol of, you know, the power of wimminhood. Like it's the moon god and the tides and cycles.'

‘And it's made of a shitload of gold.' Jane scanned world gold prices on a special site on the internet devoted to stock prices. It was updated every day.

‘For setting up the wimmin's refuge,' said Paul, nodding at the ball. ‘We're doing good here.'

‘Yep. Sell this baby and we'll use that money to ... once I've moved it around a little, you know on the currency markets and global trading shit. The best wimmin's refuge we can buy.'

A knock on the door stopped them. The floor was covered with their burglar gear. There were two balaclavas on the sofa.

Jane put her finger to her lips to signal for quiet.

A woman's voice called from outside, ‘Paul? Are you home?'

Jane glared.

Paul grabbed the golden ball, straining to lift it as a key went into their front door lock. ‘Paul, are you decent?

Jane had her embroidered, patchwork shoulder bag up and over her shoulder. She strode towards and out the door as it opened.

‘Oh, it's you Jane. Hello. Paul?'

‘Muuuuuum,' said Paul, frantically sticky-taping the top of the box.

Adam stood on a walkway above the biggest mail-sorting room he had ever seen. Letters raced along conveyor belts where girls grabbed them and read the postcodes in an instant, flicking them to the correct suburb, where they bounced into large canvas bags ready to go out to the suburban branches. Other letters and packages continued on to International, where more girls grabbed and checked and tossed them into other canvas bags with countries written on them. The
bags would be trucked out to a loading bay and taken by vans to the suburbs and airport where they'd be sorted again and put in smaller bags and given to posties who'd cycle along streets and put each letter, each package, each important communication in the letterbox of the person it was meant for. It was fast and efficient and moved like clockwork. It was the postal service and it connected everyone to everywhere in the world.