Lindsey's Law
Kangaroo Ground Memorial Tower was fifty feet tall overlooking the parking area - my curl tips felt one second away from a grinders edge and my 1996 Ford Laser looked stamped down to a dust particle from the top of it. Here I exist, from 7am till mid afternoon, my grinder tip pointing down. I remove my head gear and think I hear somewhere through the dull cacophony of machines “God Save the Queen” in strange eurythmic divorce, echoing right through the towers homunculus body. At first shrugging it off as some kind of undiagnosed harmonic psychosis. But why “God Save the Queen”? Then quickly reassuring myself it was more than likely my English co-worker. That has to be it.. Then realising again it was even more likely the former because he wasn’t English he was Welsh.
I look around through a fog of hydrated lime and portland cement to someone moving left and right emerging within a few feet of me. Lifting a tired hand to his mouth signalling it was time for smoko. A few grinders left buzzing, it was approximately 11am. I say approximately because we almost never leave for smoko on time. I felt a small smack of denial creep up on me preceded by relief - A relief that the dust will settle and stop stuffing my lungs, a relief that the tower we were restoring wasn’t gradually crushing us. And denial arising from the fact I had made my living as an Apprentice Stonemason.
My mind sometimes subsumes itself in genial horror when, with great difficulty I manage to glimpse such an un-pasteurised thought. I take a few steps down the rickety scaffold. Lindsey fires a cigarette. His mettle head, a Stonemason hailing from the Victorian countryside, drips of well earned sweat clump together to part his mousish fringe. His brow strained with an almost excessive attention to his cigarette. The lighter clicks in his fingers -
“See the kangaroos along the highway this morning mate?”
“I didn’t! But plenty of signs”
“And plenty of them as road kill”, he returned jesting at the absurdity of the situation.
He looked back, eyes squinted. His acne scars tore across his cheeks illuminated by the marriage of both light and dust.
“And do you sometimes see the farmer a few pastures down burning of an afternoon?”
“I thought burning was illegal?”
“You need a permit in Victoria”
We both paused for a few steps as he chugged his cigarette. Then continued
“Well.. It’s not a nice sight seeing them lying along the road like that. I’ve never hit one myself but they say you shouldn’t stop if one jumps out at you.”
“But wouldn’t it just go straight through the windshield?” I said
It felt ironic to me that we were restoring a man-made structure and at the same time contributing to the destruction of the environment we co-inhabited, whether that be through physical action or unwilling comprehension. Though, I reminded myself; action always succeeded thought.
Then;
‘Lindsey wasn’t exempt from this universal truth if he liked it or not.’
Lindsey was a Scotsman but not in the traditional sense. His family had immigrated to Australia in the 1900’s. He always made a point of letting us know. His temperament, even though I had felt it was scarcely revealed to me, trailed with a proud, brutish edge.
“Better than being driven off the road into a tree I guess” he answered.
Across from the memorial tower was a caretaker's weatherboard lodge. Now long abandoned, due to be knocked down at the beginning of next year. I’d sometimes walk through its decrepit tin mantle. The front room felt like a catacomb of once-prized affection, warring with wall-paper virulence. Its floral majesties incited heartburn and photographs littered an open hearth. 4 x 6 inch photographs taken on a phone quality camera. Mostly selfies, a family with their arms around each other, slightly overweight, bearing their teeth to the camera in what felt like an attempt to manufacture happiness. I never looked very long at each photo, as some were slightly singed. Giving the impression of something arcane.
I’d walked around the half-sunlit rooms once with a few of my co-workers. Each made passing remarks about the phantom smell, and the need for Eltham city council to re-possess and demolish the structure. Lindsey never came. He didn’t want to. I respected this detached sensibility of his, and at the same time questioned my own intrusions.
I’d often sit to eat my lunch at the doorstep of the main sun-room, my mind vigilant that at any time a spectre might creep up behind me halfway through a bite of my chicken roll. Carpet wrecked with stains overlooking its patchy backyard. A hills hoist neatly poised beneath a row of old Italian Cypress shrouding an industrial headland. The ribs of which were walked by animal refugees escaping the country's strained highways, the sad onslaught of Lin Fox and trade vehicles barely contained.
After I scoffed the cold remains of last nights dinner I wandered the ankle length patches of yard through a gaping hole in the paling fence to the headland. Kangaroo paws a couple of feet from heel to finger. Markings of various birds, and other times what appeared to be a fox or stray dog. Traced the meandering sky way, looking out on an enumeration of browns, dusty figments of bush my eyes could barely ascertain.
My mind felt more drawn to the immediate vicinity of anomalous steel chunks scattered in intervals. Rust breaking through their coated exteriors. A large, beige transformer, its swelling drone making the vast country heat retort from itself and continuing up to the north corner of the fence was a shimmering concrete silo, 12ft tall beating down upon the horizon.
Very soon winter drew like eyelids on a satellite, though we all still wore belly buster shorts. I’d sit very comfortably on the ridge fingering small pieces of twig like a child and sense the transformers intonations wriggle through my thighs. And the soil where the entwining animal trails and stamped wombat shit made me feel the sick absence of wild.
“What do you think of the mortar colour?” Lindsey had asked me one day when it was only him and I at the site.
“I like it”, I replied
It was a sunny day in Autumn, the grass around the tower hadn’t been cut and field gnats swarmed wherever there was damp. We were sitting at a bench eating our lunch. Heads craned, looking up at the tower spectacle - adorned in aluminium scaffolding.
“Well” I said, squinting my eyes to peer through the scaffold, “I can’t tell from down here..”
“I feel as though it takes away from the natural colour of the stone” - his reply somewhat stung, though the tone delivered was assuredly simple.
Looking up, I noticed the stone itself was a sandstone chalky spectrum of beige with vibrant red veins, like the mantle of a dried up river bed. An amalgamation of ordinary quartz and mineral composites. The mortar, too dull to appear existent.
“We’re restoring it from the original colour though, aren't we?” I replied, my eyes catching a glare from the aluminium sheen made me divert my gaze. Though Lindsey’s attention remained steadfast to the structure. He lit a cigarette hanging off his ear.
“Thats the problem. We’ll never match what a century of rain and hands and wind have done. Bastards never thought we’d be babying it forever - besides the tower holds an imagined purpose. It’s not like someone is livin’ here.”
“That’s like saying death holds an ‘imaginary purpose’..”, I imagine the ghosts residing within the tower and it startled me.
“I’m saying we spend half our time fixin’ what could’ve been done right the first time. Building’s going up faster than we can think and getting torn down cause the gloss wore off. What's the point? This job will finish within the next couple of months and trust me we won’t be looking back”
“That’s our job though, to look back?”
“Those soldiers didn’t die for our country just so we could keep their graves looking f*cking immaculate or in the hopes someone would carve their name right. Thing is, restoration nowadays is just the country pretending to hold itself together. It’s all about whose name goes on a spreadsheet somewhere, who gets a tax deduction, who gets the most votes, who takes accountability for what's not gettin’ fixed.”
In that moment, a white Toyota Hilux spluttered up the hill into the parking lot behind us. We both swivelled our heads to see a man emerge from the vehicle, half balding, hiding behind a huge pair of black shades. Pulling in beside him a sun-damaged blue Minivan. It’s bonnet peeling in discolored swathes of irradiated pink and a woman with longish, dyed black hair of somewhat small stature that hid her age.
We watch the couple approach and mouth a few words to each other. Words that echoed indiscernably, like pinecones dropping in the distance. The man half raises his arm to grasp her shoulder.
“Well looky looky it's our couple again..” Lindsey commented dryly
“They meet here almost every day, definitely somethin’ sketchy going on.. God knows what they’re doin’ in that car.” His voice captured an excitement only a schoolboy whose friend snuck off under the stadium rafters with his crush could emulate.
“So if a freak wind swept this tower.. God forbid this whole parking space away! Leaving nothing but rubble and open paddock and livestock. Do you think their love would still exist?” I blurted out.
“Well I’d like to think so, but that’s really if what they’re feeling is love.”
The couple threw their arms around each other.
“What if it happened after they had finally called it quits. Years in the future, when they both live in different countries, continents even. Long days confining their love to an obscure parking lot could get tiring right?”
Lindsey took a drag from his cigarette.
“Their memories of each other won’t last. People forget.. Or mostly become indifferent to things..” He shrugged and stopped seemingly mid sentence to take another drag.
“..You’re right they’ll get tired. They’ll pack things up and move on, that’s what people do.”
“But will they look back? We’re constantly refocusing our vision from small to large, small to large, but isn’t that apart of the problem?” my voice shook with an urgency not even I had expected.
Lindsey looked almost taken aback, shrinking now from further elaboration.
But I pushed him.
“I mean if there was such a thing as love don’t you think it could survive a two hundred kilometre an hour gale force wind capable of moving small hills? It would only create further universal inconsistencies, consequences I mean.. that could reverberate throughout time if everyone completely disregarded that which was socially agreed upon to be “meaningless” and.. th.. THE ADULTERERS!” I spat, pointing to the couple who were nowhere to be seen, tucked away somewhere in their scanty blue Minivan behind shade glass windows.
“Stop talking so loud. We don’t actually know if they’re adulterers or not. I mean what is mutually accepted to be “meaningless” would be either dangerous or unimportant in the terms of survival.”
“Don’t you think a Government that abandons it’s memorials is also rehearsing how to abandon its people? ‘Meaning’ impinges on morals.. I mean if we don’t keep this and they don’t keep their hill then we’re basically admitting survival isn’t enough!”
Lindsey stopped his tract of speech to gaze skyward, mouth opening mutely to symbolise the rejection of his idea.
“When you’re on the ground looking up the grandeur almost seems overwhelming. But when you climb to the top of that tower looking out it all looks the same.” His voice trailed off, void of brutish sensibility. I could see the man’s mind was trapped between the wings of two strenuous extremes.
Syncopated wind rustles surrounded us and after a while Lindsey casually observed his watch;
1 1:45pm
“Back to it then” he said
I caught a glimpse of the couple getting out of the blue Minivan, both returning to their respective vehicles. Lindsey didn’t turn to look. His cigarette flared as he took his last puff and flicked it into a family of magpies who had been circling us. One of the younger magpies with ruffled brown feathers hopped cautiously over to the burnt filter and pecked at it.
Walking back to the smoko shed I noticed that a weed had started strangling the lawns. A brief thought flipped my mind; “Has this always been here?”. It’s pungy stem and yellow bell shaped flower looked like the arms of sprites raising their fists through the Earth. Looking at it from the top of the tower was like witnessing a tide of yellow sieging the tower walls from all directions and gave the illusion that I was a lot closer to the ground than I actually was.
It felt warranting to me that the appearance of this weed had entangled itself with Lindsey and I’s conversation. That our words had conjured in nature a similar affect to how Lindsey’s words had affected me. How they seemed to circle and contain mine, like a magpie staring down a worm burrowed in its ditch.
Contradiction entrenched and repossessed, strangling, being strangled and giving life all at once. “Meaning impinges on morals” - meaning also impinges on the way mouths work. Our words variegated in that moment. A balancing act, confused meanings, discriminating, disproving and converging in unexpected ways.
That day there were gunshots in the news. The headlines read “12 Confirmed Dead in Bondi Mass Shooting”. Gunshots that seemed to reverberate even as far as the Kangaroo Ground Memorial Tower. I splintered my pointer finger on a rusty nail while dismantling the floorboards inside of the tower. Thick blood gushed everywhere and I thought “I wonder if I’m up to date with my tetanus shots?”. Lindsey patched me up with a bandage too large for my finger, awkwardly bound making it nearly impossible to work without catching it on something.
A while after that incident my finger healed, though skin continued to tear off in large quantities for quite some time in the area around the wound. Robbing me of any discernable fingerprint, as if this inconceivably small happening had somehow ripped through the perceptive fabric of everything surrounding it.
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