pete_gasparino
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Jul 11, 2003
- Messages
- 251
Despite the subject heading, this has nothing to do with rave parties by the way...well very little anyway...and it's not to do with the fact that I posted this at 4am, which I just noticed....I guess I do most of my posts at this hour, just because I get up before the crack of dawn and feel so refreshed and energised! No just joking
Anyway I called the story '4am' when I wrote it
“At some undetermined point in the great immensity of its past – perhaps 45,000 years ago, perhaps 60,000 … [Australia] was quietly invaded by a deeply inscrutable people, the Aborigines, who have no clearly evident racial or linguistic kinship to their neighbours in the region, and whose presence in Australia can be explained only by positing that they invented and mastered ocean-going craft at least 30,000 years in advance of anyone else in order to undertake an exodus , then forgot or abandoned nearly all that they had learned and scarcely ever bothered with the open sea again.
It is an accomplishment so singular and extra-ordinary, so uncomfortable with scrutiny, that most histories breeze over it in a paragraph or two…”
Bill Bryson – Down Under
“They may appear to some to be the most wretched people on earth, but in reality they are far happier than we Europeans. They live a life of tranquillity which is not disturbed by the inequality of condition; the earth and the sea of their own accord furnish them with all things necessary for life … they seemed to set no value upon anything we gave them.”
Captain James Cook
Four a.m., and I was walking somewhere, I think through Redfern, dwarfed and concealed by towering darkness and grey slate alley walls. An implacable, acrid smell stung my nose. I shifted my eyes with the rapidity of someone who was obviously scared.
And I was: further towards the pubs and bars of George Street, I might have encountered violent drunks, but the chances would be much more likely they’d encounter someone else first.
Yet further still, towards the nightclubs around Cockle Bay I knew I would be safe enough. Safe enough to appreciate the harbour and the way the lights from the convention centre reflected and danced off the dirty water. I might have met a girl down there; someone lost for a minute, with pupils like dinner-plates, her smile too wide for sobriety. Her green and silver dress and generously styled hair might be attractive, and the same as a thousand other girls dancing to four-four deep house beats, lost for a couple of hours in empathy and energy. She would have fallen in love with me.
But she’d talk too fast, walk too close, and two hours later her serotonin levels would be exhausted, along with the empathy and exaggerated sense of human connection they’d provided her with. We’d be two strangers again, she’d be lost and scared, and she probably wouldn’t look as good in the harsh daylight.
I kept walking. There weren’t many nightclubs up here, or pills with Mitsubishi or Calvin Klein logos that kept you up all night, blood running with that wide-eyed, innocent, euphoric vulnerability.
There was mostly smack up here and people without money who wanted it. People who were out at that moment looking for a way to find fifty dollars, fifty in a hurry, fifty for a cap, fifty for that ‘waking up and stretching in the morning’ high, soft and comfortable and four hours long.
There were Abos here, too. Drunken, vicious, white eyes on dark skin blending into the equally dark night. Fucking Abos. I could feel them through the chilling wind as I walked, could smell them through the dusty cold air that permeated these streets.
The lights of the city were much brighter now: if all went well I’d get there, not even there, but to the city’s edge and Central station, without incident.
If I kept my head down, my eyes down, body hunched forward as though it were enduring racks of pain or some physical madness, I’d get there. No one wants to fuck with a crazy, or a junkie, because they’ve fucked with themselves so much that they’ve got nothing left.
A burly Abo of about forty or fifty passed on the other side of the road. He was watching me.
There were too many Aboriginals around here: they crawled from the Block like parasites, hounded anyone ‘Aussie’ for money or physical revenge, in most cases both. They wanted revenge on me because I was white, because a long time ago this was their country. I wasn’t on the boat; I didn’t hold up the telescope for Captain Cook, I didn’t come up with the idea to start a convict colony here.
They wanted revenge because their lives were shit, and mine was not. Their skin didn’t dictate their circumstances. No, their actions did. They were wild, like animals.
I passed by the Abo, towards the line of bus stops on Broadway. They were packed with people, and I felt safer: they were Asian, mostly, and white – the former sitting quietly, conservatively, heading to or from late night occupations. The latter seemed, in the general terms in which I liked to think, to be enjoying the morning. Still half-drunk, they congregated, speaking loudly and pointing towards the green neon shopfronts through sporadic yet consistent, noisy traffic. A street cleaning vehicle crawled up the road somewhere, swiping debris from the roads, and allowing a regular, dull din to audibly underscore the passing cars and buses.
I kept on going, heading for the tunnel that would deliver me into Central station, and its relative safety and warmth.
The tunnel was the last step, the last challenge. It had at that time, in my mind, some sense of notoriety about it: “that yellow-green Central tunnel”. I’d heard of people being accosted there, being bashed or baited, money taken, bones broken. I’d only ever seen buskers there, but I had never been through at this kind of hour.
The tunnel looked empty. I kept going. Descended a short flight of stone stairs, past a closed restaurant square, and into the long tunnel’s confines. A blast of air hit me, the wind’s cold breath shooting through from the other side. The temperature seemed worse, now that I was underground.
There was no one ahead of me. No buskers, no Abos, no crooks or thieves, no smack heads or drunks, no one at all.
A bare empty stretch of scuffed white tile, green walls, exaggerated fluorescence presented itself. I could hear my feet hitting the floor and I shuffled along: the darkness that was Central station, at the tunnel’s end, awaited me.
Before long I heard footsteps to my rear. I couldn’t tell in particular terms how far away they were. It sounded like one person.
Moments later there were more footsteps, and with them voices; loud, callous, drunk, most likely some men, and a woman. I kept going.
They started shouting and whistling through the narrow stretch of tunnel, echo exaggerating the slurred, sullen calls.
“Slow down, fuckwit”, the woman said, but I didn’t. I sped up, mind and body prepared for action: not combative but elusive. Would it be possible to reach the end of the tunnel in time? I was about halfway there.
More catcalls and hoarse insults ensued. They beckoned for me to slow down, to turn about, to face them. “Fuckin’ idiot, stop walkin’.” Their taunts elicited no response. I didn’t even turn, and I started moving faster still.
I heard their footsteps against the tiles, loud and repetitive, and was wary of them: they tapped as fast as mine, faster. All I could be sure of was that there were at least two of them, more likely three or four. A large group. Adrenaline rushed through my veins and I breathed hard, fast, sucking raw piercing winter into my lungs, and then exhaling in vapour. It dispersed as quickly as it came. I slid my hands from my pockets.
Their footsteps grew faster still.
A bottle shattered somewhere behind me, and voices shot up and down the tunnel again: they interacted with each other and with me. I still couldn’t discern how many there were, by voice or footstep. They growled, and some seemed further back towards the entrance, others closer to me.
The voices sounded like those of Abos: there was at least one of the bastards in the group. They all sounded about the same, the Abos, they all had accents. It was that familiar stain of the words and the language that seemed to occur amongst all aboriginals, drunk or sober.
Another bottle shattered, this one much closer, and I turned, finally.
Reality presented a very different scene to the one I had imagined.
Closest to me, a young man walked, or more appropriately, half-jogged. He was young, with black hair and wild eyes, dark sweatshirt and trackpants torn in places. He was scared, I could see that much. His features were distinctly Aboriginal.
Some metres behind him were a group of two men, tall and dressed in patterned shirts and jeans, fashionably torn themselves, in places. With them as well was a woman, a young woman with a green skirt and the kind of blonde hair style that would have cost more than the boost in self-confidence it allowed her was worth. She exuded that personal style and photocopy fashion sense which seemed pervasive at the time, at least in Sydney: an attractive clone in high heels. Her delicate, over painted features would attract attention, though, but only in less populated social circumstances.
They walked with a collective, aggressive gait, and while their postures suggested hostility, their faces wore drunken grins. Not the kind of grins suggestive of genuine and peaceful happiness, not the kind of MDMA induced, sweat and serotonin flushed grins worn by city club patrons. They wore mean greats, grins of contended, pissed belligerence.
Another look at the girl, attractive as I said, in a familiar sort of way, revealed a more slightly haggard look. There was evidence of a night of drinking and dancing and walking. Her makeup, liberally applied, had smeared somewhat. But she had white teeth, so white they looked like they had been painted that way.
My awareness of the situation changed in an instant. The focus of the group behind the Abo was on him, and not me. They didn’t look in my direction, didn’t seem to notice me.
With a sudden, sadistic crack, another bottle hit the tiles near the Abo kid and shattered instantly. The shards slid this way and that, catastrophic and dangerous within the closed tunnel walls. A ricochet of glass shrapnel caught him in the leg. Blood poured from the wound and matted his ratty sweatpants to his leg, then seeped onto the tiles.
The off-white ceramic turned red with blood. In fact dark red, almost as dark as the skin from which it poured. The Abo gave a scream, and his eyes were wide with pain. He clutched his injury and attempted to run, but it was a near impossibility: the leg kept giving out.
The shouts from the group behind us increased in pitch and intensity: they were in a frenzy now, the woman especially. They laughed with the kind of manic fervour typically restricted to the grey stone psychiatric bedlams that scattered the city (and the gates and side streets around them as well, the quality state of the city’s mental health provision for all to see and usually, try to ignore). Then they moved forward, all at once, with speed.
I instinctually darted towards the Abo and grabbed him, hoisted him up a bit. He was light, and that surprised me for a reason I can’t remember. We moved as fast as we could, with me grasping him in my arms as though he were my child. His face was paler now, covered in a film of sweat.
And his eyes were white. As white as the girls teeth. Whiter than me by a hell of a lot, and whiter than the tiles. White like paper, with the sheen of pearl.
Blood, warm and fast, dribbled onto my clothes as we moved, and we moved fast. They would have to be after both of us now.
But they weren’t. Within metres of the tunnel’s Central Station exit they backed off: the girl had tripped. There was no time for a detailed inspection on my part.
I took the Abo kid to the station manager’s office. They called the cops, and drove him to the hospital. I talked with him a bit before he left.
He was from Dubbo. Fifteen years old. He was called ‘Lester’. He was softly spoken, a voice to match his features, despite their dark pigmentation. He said if I ever came to Dubbo, I should ask for him.
I didn’t think that I would ask an Abo on the streets anything, especially in Dubbo. But I still remember Lester. Mostly I remember his eyes, and how white they were. They reflected something beyond the pain and intensity of the situation. Sadness, maybe. Or loneliness.
The closest I can get to an articulation of that look is ‘separation’.
Anyway I called the story '4am' when I wrote it
“At some undetermined point in the great immensity of its past – perhaps 45,000 years ago, perhaps 60,000 … [Australia] was quietly invaded by a deeply inscrutable people, the Aborigines, who have no clearly evident racial or linguistic kinship to their neighbours in the region, and whose presence in Australia can be explained only by positing that they invented and mastered ocean-going craft at least 30,000 years in advance of anyone else in order to undertake an exodus , then forgot or abandoned nearly all that they had learned and scarcely ever bothered with the open sea again.
It is an accomplishment so singular and extra-ordinary, so uncomfortable with scrutiny, that most histories breeze over it in a paragraph or two…”
Bill Bryson – Down Under
“They may appear to some to be the most wretched people on earth, but in reality they are far happier than we Europeans. They live a life of tranquillity which is not disturbed by the inequality of condition; the earth and the sea of their own accord furnish them with all things necessary for life … they seemed to set no value upon anything we gave them.”
Captain James Cook
Four a.m., and I was walking somewhere, I think through Redfern, dwarfed and concealed by towering darkness and grey slate alley walls. An implacable, acrid smell stung my nose. I shifted my eyes with the rapidity of someone who was obviously scared.
And I was: further towards the pubs and bars of George Street, I might have encountered violent drunks, but the chances would be much more likely they’d encounter someone else first.
Yet further still, towards the nightclubs around Cockle Bay I knew I would be safe enough. Safe enough to appreciate the harbour and the way the lights from the convention centre reflected and danced off the dirty water. I might have met a girl down there; someone lost for a minute, with pupils like dinner-plates, her smile too wide for sobriety. Her green and silver dress and generously styled hair might be attractive, and the same as a thousand other girls dancing to four-four deep house beats, lost for a couple of hours in empathy and energy. She would have fallen in love with me.
But she’d talk too fast, walk too close, and two hours later her serotonin levels would be exhausted, along with the empathy and exaggerated sense of human connection they’d provided her with. We’d be two strangers again, she’d be lost and scared, and she probably wouldn’t look as good in the harsh daylight.
I kept walking. There weren’t many nightclubs up here, or pills with Mitsubishi or Calvin Klein logos that kept you up all night, blood running with that wide-eyed, innocent, euphoric vulnerability.
There was mostly smack up here and people without money who wanted it. People who were out at that moment looking for a way to find fifty dollars, fifty in a hurry, fifty for a cap, fifty for that ‘waking up and stretching in the morning’ high, soft and comfortable and four hours long.
There were Abos here, too. Drunken, vicious, white eyes on dark skin blending into the equally dark night. Fucking Abos. I could feel them through the chilling wind as I walked, could smell them through the dusty cold air that permeated these streets.
The lights of the city were much brighter now: if all went well I’d get there, not even there, but to the city’s edge and Central station, without incident.
If I kept my head down, my eyes down, body hunched forward as though it were enduring racks of pain or some physical madness, I’d get there. No one wants to fuck with a crazy, or a junkie, because they’ve fucked with themselves so much that they’ve got nothing left.
A burly Abo of about forty or fifty passed on the other side of the road. He was watching me.
There were too many Aboriginals around here: they crawled from the Block like parasites, hounded anyone ‘Aussie’ for money or physical revenge, in most cases both. They wanted revenge on me because I was white, because a long time ago this was their country. I wasn’t on the boat; I didn’t hold up the telescope for Captain Cook, I didn’t come up with the idea to start a convict colony here.
They wanted revenge because their lives were shit, and mine was not. Their skin didn’t dictate their circumstances. No, their actions did. They were wild, like animals.
I passed by the Abo, towards the line of bus stops on Broadway. They were packed with people, and I felt safer: they were Asian, mostly, and white – the former sitting quietly, conservatively, heading to or from late night occupations. The latter seemed, in the general terms in which I liked to think, to be enjoying the morning. Still half-drunk, they congregated, speaking loudly and pointing towards the green neon shopfronts through sporadic yet consistent, noisy traffic. A street cleaning vehicle crawled up the road somewhere, swiping debris from the roads, and allowing a regular, dull din to audibly underscore the passing cars and buses.
I kept on going, heading for the tunnel that would deliver me into Central station, and its relative safety and warmth.
The tunnel was the last step, the last challenge. It had at that time, in my mind, some sense of notoriety about it: “that yellow-green Central tunnel”. I’d heard of people being accosted there, being bashed or baited, money taken, bones broken. I’d only ever seen buskers there, but I had never been through at this kind of hour.
The tunnel looked empty. I kept going. Descended a short flight of stone stairs, past a closed restaurant square, and into the long tunnel’s confines. A blast of air hit me, the wind’s cold breath shooting through from the other side. The temperature seemed worse, now that I was underground.
There was no one ahead of me. No buskers, no Abos, no crooks or thieves, no smack heads or drunks, no one at all.
A bare empty stretch of scuffed white tile, green walls, exaggerated fluorescence presented itself. I could hear my feet hitting the floor and I shuffled along: the darkness that was Central station, at the tunnel’s end, awaited me.
Before long I heard footsteps to my rear. I couldn’t tell in particular terms how far away they were. It sounded like one person.
Moments later there were more footsteps, and with them voices; loud, callous, drunk, most likely some men, and a woman. I kept going.
They started shouting and whistling through the narrow stretch of tunnel, echo exaggerating the slurred, sullen calls.
“Slow down, fuckwit”, the woman said, but I didn’t. I sped up, mind and body prepared for action: not combative but elusive. Would it be possible to reach the end of the tunnel in time? I was about halfway there.
More catcalls and hoarse insults ensued. They beckoned for me to slow down, to turn about, to face them. “Fuckin’ idiot, stop walkin’.” Their taunts elicited no response. I didn’t even turn, and I started moving faster still.
I heard their footsteps against the tiles, loud and repetitive, and was wary of them: they tapped as fast as mine, faster. All I could be sure of was that there were at least two of them, more likely three or four. A large group. Adrenaline rushed through my veins and I breathed hard, fast, sucking raw piercing winter into my lungs, and then exhaling in vapour. It dispersed as quickly as it came. I slid my hands from my pockets.
Their footsteps grew faster still.
A bottle shattered somewhere behind me, and voices shot up and down the tunnel again: they interacted with each other and with me. I still couldn’t discern how many there were, by voice or footstep. They growled, and some seemed further back towards the entrance, others closer to me.
The voices sounded like those of Abos: there was at least one of the bastards in the group. They all sounded about the same, the Abos, they all had accents. It was that familiar stain of the words and the language that seemed to occur amongst all aboriginals, drunk or sober.
Another bottle shattered, this one much closer, and I turned, finally.
Reality presented a very different scene to the one I had imagined.
Closest to me, a young man walked, or more appropriately, half-jogged. He was young, with black hair and wild eyes, dark sweatshirt and trackpants torn in places. He was scared, I could see that much. His features were distinctly Aboriginal.
Some metres behind him were a group of two men, tall and dressed in patterned shirts and jeans, fashionably torn themselves, in places. With them as well was a woman, a young woman with a green skirt and the kind of blonde hair style that would have cost more than the boost in self-confidence it allowed her was worth. She exuded that personal style and photocopy fashion sense which seemed pervasive at the time, at least in Sydney: an attractive clone in high heels. Her delicate, over painted features would attract attention, though, but only in less populated social circumstances.
They walked with a collective, aggressive gait, and while their postures suggested hostility, their faces wore drunken grins. Not the kind of grins suggestive of genuine and peaceful happiness, not the kind of MDMA induced, sweat and serotonin flushed grins worn by city club patrons. They wore mean greats, grins of contended, pissed belligerence.
Another look at the girl, attractive as I said, in a familiar sort of way, revealed a more slightly haggard look. There was evidence of a night of drinking and dancing and walking. Her makeup, liberally applied, had smeared somewhat. But she had white teeth, so white they looked like they had been painted that way.
My awareness of the situation changed in an instant. The focus of the group behind the Abo was on him, and not me. They didn’t look in my direction, didn’t seem to notice me.
With a sudden, sadistic crack, another bottle hit the tiles near the Abo kid and shattered instantly. The shards slid this way and that, catastrophic and dangerous within the closed tunnel walls. A ricochet of glass shrapnel caught him in the leg. Blood poured from the wound and matted his ratty sweatpants to his leg, then seeped onto the tiles.
The off-white ceramic turned red with blood. In fact dark red, almost as dark as the skin from which it poured. The Abo gave a scream, and his eyes were wide with pain. He clutched his injury and attempted to run, but it was a near impossibility: the leg kept giving out.
The shouts from the group behind us increased in pitch and intensity: they were in a frenzy now, the woman especially. They laughed with the kind of manic fervour typically restricted to the grey stone psychiatric bedlams that scattered the city (and the gates and side streets around them as well, the quality state of the city’s mental health provision for all to see and usually, try to ignore). Then they moved forward, all at once, with speed.
I instinctually darted towards the Abo and grabbed him, hoisted him up a bit. He was light, and that surprised me for a reason I can’t remember. We moved as fast as we could, with me grasping him in my arms as though he were my child. His face was paler now, covered in a film of sweat.
And his eyes were white. As white as the girls teeth. Whiter than me by a hell of a lot, and whiter than the tiles. White like paper, with the sheen of pearl.
Blood, warm and fast, dribbled onto my clothes as we moved, and we moved fast. They would have to be after both of us now.
But they weren’t. Within metres of the tunnel’s Central Station exit they backed off: the girl had tripped. There was no time for a detailed inspection on my part.
I took the Abo kid to the station manager’s office. They called the cops, and drove him to the hospital. I talked with him a bit before he left.
He was from Dubbo. Fifteen years old. He was called ‘Lester’. He was softly spoken, a voice to match his features, despite their dark pigmentation. He said if I ever came to Dubbo, I should ask for him.
I didn’t think that I would ask an Abo on the streets anything, especially in Dubbo. But I still remember Lester. Mostly I remember his eyes, and how white they were. They reflected something beyond the pain and intensity of the situation. Sadness, maybe. Or loneliness.
The closest I can get to an articulation of that look is ‘separation’.
