THE PLACES FLED

The weather was cold in just about every sense. Even when the sun shone, he felt as if there were too many spaces in between. Consumate act, false trails, warm places, and then this. The places he had fled. Michael was glad to see his children, glad to be back, for a while, in a non-confrontational place. But in between all those spaces, the gaps in the fabric of things, lay a horror whch would never die. They might call it normality; but for him it was a fear of mediocrity. If there could be such a thing.

Little had moved on in the years he had been away. The debates seemed much the same. The election issues were no issues at all. The few friends he had seen were old, cold and grumpy. His mother still whistled hymns, waiting for the ravishing. He missed company, as he would always miss company, as if in the bubble stream of bars and outrage there could be genuine communication; for someone such as himself.

He walked briskly; and people said good morning.

Michael wanted to be lost in some other, more silken clime.

It was the thing that struck him the most about returning to Australia; the ordinariness of it.

Earlier in the year, while in Nepal, he had watched footage of houses crumbling into swollen rivers during the monsoon rains. Hundreds of people had been washed down the Ganges; and in most cases people had no idea who the victims were. Bloated bodies decomposing in glacial waters. Rushing to the sea.

What felt here, as he looked across a placid ocean, to be infinite places where there was no acknowledgement, no anguish, where everything was contained in an infinite normality.

There had been little development since he had last been in the country; or little development in the territory he crossed.

Shops still bore the same signs. There were no new houses. There may have been family tragedies behind closed doors, but he could not see them. There was no more street life than before. Over-regulation continued to dampen all desire. Pensioners still huddled tighter over single bar heaters. The price of electricity had gone through the roof, as they complained. The price of a carbon tax. The cost of saving the planet from global warming. No one had warned them that it would be a price they would pay.

The economy was front and centre of the campaign; and the Labor Party, and its recycled leader Kevin Rudd, largely on the nose. Mirroring other campaigns, Rudd led off with the claim that the election was about trust, who did you trust to lead you into the future.

Next to the economy came assylum seekers, an issue that was not playing in the government's favour. Hundreds of ecnomic refugees had drowned at sea in what represented, yes, a human tragedy, but also one of the fastest boomerangs of government policy he had ever seen. Rudd had softened the stance on assylum seekers to pander to the vocal inner-city pro-refugee lobby groups; for all their activism representative of a minority view. That borders don't matter. That we are all part of the same seething mass. That we are all human.

Michael couldn't be boxed. Compassion ran every which way. People drowned or watched their children drown; immense amounts of tax payer resources were placed to leverage a political stance; and the drownings were on their heads. Which they held high and puffed: "Who do you trust?"

He didn't have any illusions that kindness ran in a cold climate; that there would be a warm place here for him; that there would be a future worth embracing in empty streets.

The euphoria some of his friends had felt during the Kevin '07 election had long since died; and now they dismissed it as a battle of millionaires, with their own complaints and tightening circumstances taking precedence. A man stood watching on a frigid shore, that famous, fatal, shore. And that, for the moment, was all that passed, cold wind, cold light. "Plausibile deniability." Michael repeated the phrase several times; as if it meant something.