A CAR DOOR SLAMMED
South Coast, NSW, Australia
In the fine winter dawn. He heard a car door slam near by. Instantly his mind turned back to being hunted; and haunted. They made a liar and a thief into a national hero, his head shouted, but in the sleeping silence of the house it wasn't even there. As if in the same circuitous, obsessive routes. Because of the same things he had said all along, he wouldn't be here if he hadn't been there. Watching them dance in the street, wishing they were dancing on his grave. Surrounding his house and chanting "buffalo, buffalo," stupid, stupid. Even now, all this time later, he could hear them, turning an old man's life into hell. An old man alone, without defenses. They didn't care. The pack was on the hunt. Their only regret was they hadn't killed him already.
So it remained uncomfortable. Slashes dashed past and ironies compounded. Morning trecks became evening walks. Distance curled into even greater distance. Years passed in other people's lives, and he was still nomadic. A fervent thought, a distant hope. Why? Why? Because it is in their nature. And shadows ran across the rocks. The summer cicadas screached. Cockatoos played on the telegraph lines. "The world is so beautiful," Buddha is reported to have said in his final days; and yes, here on the sub-tropical coast, it seemed to be true. The world is so beautiful.
Nature took a fine and distant path. Sulphur-crested cockatoos scrawked in their morning rituals, the first sign of wakefulness beyond the first cry of the kookaburra. Guests came and went, a summer dance. A shadow flickered across them. A ruin made thier way into the bar, he smiled. It was easy to relate to the misshappen and deformed. "How are you Joe," he asked, and got the obligatory, half cheerful, "No use complaining." If they had been there, if they could have left him alone. But in the aching cries of a broken heart, deceived, ridiculed and robbed, he did nothing of the kind. He ordered another beer and looked milkily across the bar; there wasn't enough alcohol in the world to hide his thoughts, to drown the incessant din.
So in their own oblique way, out of the area, Din Daeng, they tried to help him, gave him books on love, a chorus of the quiet and disconsalate. But he could not be helped, a moth to the flame. And now, in Australia, where the morning sounds were so different, he acted out a moral tale, just for them. To convince them they were right in the first place. To slip behind a screen and never be heard of again. To laugh at the memory and move on. To hide any feeling of hurt, the idiocy of cognitive dissidence, the heart felt song, if it could be called that, of dissodent choruses, smashed hopes, weary eyes, disconsolate, dissilusioned, forlorn, he watched them circle, planning, as best they could, how they could rob him. He just let them pass. There wasn't anyway to stop him. "We're done here, he thinks it's funny," one of the investigative team declared, packing up after having watched his house all day.
He didn't think it was funny. He thought it was stupid. Why were they wasting time and public resources on him, on the say of the mafia, corrupt police, corrupt and invested journalists, a sea of manipulative commentators.
Not once did they bother to ask him.
And the relatives, well the in-laws, who might have been supportive, joined in the phrase.
And he knew already, just how nasty they had been.
THE BIGGER STORY:
THE man who almost toppled a sitting prime minister says he hopes his former foe Kevin Rudd returns to the electorate to help his opponent campaign - because it would boost his own chances.
LNP candidate for Griffith Bill Glasson said he would welcome Mr Rudd back "any day of the week" following the announcement of the February 8 by-election.
"What the people of Griffith are telling me is that Mr Rudd let them down. He promised he would serve his full term of Parliament, that's the full three years," he said. "People are cynical about the costs of this by-election and cynical about the fact that yet another promise was broken."
But ALP candidate Terri Butler said she would be happy to receive any help from the former PM, adding that he had already offered his support.
"Kevin was a fantastic local member," she said. "Kevin was someone who was really regarded well by his constituents because of all the good work he did locally. People forget how much of a fantastic local representative Kevin was."
Labor is framing the by-election as a chance for locals to lodge a protest vote against the Abbott Government, which Ms Butler said had a "pretty poor first four months".