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- Herausgeber: Clink Street Publishing
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
What Will Happen To You?? A dark comedy about a reluctant accountant who wishes he was someone else, doing something else, being somewhere else, but who, what and where? We track Robbie Carton's descent from his mind- numbing accounting job to...? Well, something else probably, but before that, he has to escape his life, the tarantula, Paris, an office full of absurdity, the outback, wheelie bins and of course, Bentley, Robbie's boss and natural enemy according to Robbie. Even if he manages all that, will he ever find a way to tell Sophie he loves her?
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What Will Happen to You?
A novel by Gary N. Lines
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To Maggi
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Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster…for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’
— Friedrich W. Nietzsche, German Philosopher.
‘Wherever you go, there you are.’
— Big Book of Jewish Humor edited by Rep Moshe Waldoks and William Novak. This quote is generally acknowledged and accepted to be an apocryphal adage dating back to early Buddhist texts.
‘He felt he was a character in someone’s novel.’
— One Hot Summer’s Night, a novel by Dunleavy de Boston and reproduced with his generous, if self-serving, permission.vi
What Will Happen to You? (Brown Sauce)
A novel by #$%&^*@*
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The city rested during the sweltering nights. It ignored the stench from the rotting garbage on its streets. It ignored the strange birds in its parks. It watched the few citizens still in the city but it took no particular action against them. Not while it rested. Not in this heat. Your history, where you came from, how you existed before the city, these things were irrelevant. The only thing of relevance was ‘what will happen to you?’x
Contents
Austin Quinn
INT. AUSTIN’S APARTMENT—NIGHT
One hot summer’s night, Austin Quinn, as he preferred to be called at night, sat alone in his apartment gazing at his computer screen in deep thought. It was late. He glanced up at the blue clock on the wall. It was 00.42. He turned his eyes back to the pulsing cursor. He watched it while he waited for inspiration, but all that came was perspiration. The light from the screen lit up his pallid face and made his Ken doll black hair darker. He wore a pair of cream tennis shorts. Sweat droplets ran down his chest and down the middle of his back. In his late twenties, single, and suffering from chronic loneliness, Austin Quinn hadn’t written anything new for a long time. His life lacked form. He felt he was a character in someone’s novel. The thought that it was not too late to escape hovered at the edges of his mind.
The city seemed to be melting in the heat, and Austin could detect the faint whiff of rotting garbage waiting to be collected on the sidewalks below. The city’s inhabitants hated being in the city during the summer months. They disappeared to exotic beaches or cool mountain retreats for their holidays. They sat in auditoriums with sunburnt shoulders, listening to sweating comedians forcing laughs, or in chambers open to the night sky where they looked through fat telescopes at the constellations and sipped lemonade drinks with bobbing ice. During these times, the city was unusually quiet and less malevolent, not as voracious, not as capricious, as it was in cooler times.
In the heat, the city ‘rested’, as Austin had described it in the opening of 2his novel. He typed the paragraph more than once. He typed it at least once each night. He built its muscle with each repetition.
The city rested during the sweltering nights. It ignored the stench from the rotting garbage on its streets. It ignored the strange birds in its parks. It watched the few citizens still in the city but it took no particular action against them. Not while it rested. Not in this heat. Your history, where you came from, how you existed before the city, these things were irrelevant. The only thing of relevance was, ‘what will happen to you?’
Austin Quinn didn’t know what would happen to him.
He absorbed the city’s heat as though it were a coded message. He kept his window open to catch the odd gentle waft of air. He stabbed his fork into a piece of rockmelon on a dish next to his computer. He rested the fruit on his lips before pushing it into his mouth. He crushed it with his teeth and swallowed.
He inhaled the stench from below. To Austin, that smell was the city. It was the smell of digestion, of the city’s guts, of human detritus moving through its stomach bag, its duodenum, its jejunum, its ileum, its colon, and its working anus—city streets leading to the sewer. It was the smell of the city decomposing, of life rotting. It was the best of smells, it was the worst of smells.
The words What will happen to you? appeared on buildings, across billboards, on pavements, especially on the pavements, throughout the boroughs. People looked down when they hurried along the streets. What will happen to you? scrawled in white chalk. No one knew who the author was. Was it the work of an individual anarchist? Or was it the nocturnal city itself catching its population off guard and keeping them disconcerted, rattled, off kilter? No one knew the answer to the question. But the citizens found a strange ease in the words. Was the question from the past or was it for now? Or was it for the future? Or from its antecedent, Eternity in yellow chalk? It united everyone in an instinctive way. Everyone faced the same terrifying question, and the huddled citizens found some comfort and safety in the fact that no one had the answer, but everyone together had the question.
Tonight, like many nights, Austin couldn’t write. Nothing new came. He sat still and waited. His bladder felt half full or fullish. It was difficult to be precise. He typed his opening paragraph again, his fingers flowing 3robotically across the keys. After a while, he crossed his forearms on his desk and rested his head on them. He wondered if a tarantula was eyeing him from some dark crevice in the room. He felt exhausted. On nights like this, he thought about Sophie Fanshawe and the privilege of kissing her. A long time ago, he took Sophie out a few times. He liked this memory. They went to dinner and had sushi. He drank cold saké, more saké than Austin knew to be optimal. He’d met her at The Writers Circle. The group met every Wednesday night at seven pm sharp. The moment he saw her, he recognised her. Sophie Fanshawe tended bar at the Stalwart pub in the city. Austin drank there Friday nights. He sat on the same stool at the bar and drank to excess and spoke to no one. He fell in love with Sophie from across the bar at the Stalwart, and again the first time he heard her dark voice in The Writers Circle, where he remained incognito. She pronounced every word. She elevated the verbs, as though they were alive and each deserved admiration. She spoke to the spellbound souls around the room. Sophie Fanshawe treated the members of The Writers Circle with reverence. They felt unique and singled out and appreciated, not pitied—as they pitied themselves, as the city pitied them.
The first time Austin attended the Circle, Sophie was invited to read snapshots of her work. Her beautiful prose left Austin stunned, with a dry mouth, fixed eyes, and a precise reduction of his usual sense of ambiguity. At times, Austin felt as though his existence was imaginary but Sophie, through her writing, made him feel real and not invented—unlike his fictional namesake ‘Austin Quinn’ in the lauded novel, One Hot Summer’s Night, written by the American writer, Dunleavy de Boston. De Boston’s fictional Austin Quinn’s role cost him his identity within de Boston’s novel—‘identity’ was one of de Boston’s thematic obsessions.
It was no coincidence Austin’s name happened to be the same as Dunleavy de Boston’s character. Austin had chosen the name himself for The Writers Circle. It was a convenience for Austin that the convenor of The Writers Circle had set a writing exercise for everyone in the Circle, before Austin joined, which was to write a story that incorporated de Boston’s reluctant anti-detective character, Austin Quinn. The task was to prompt the group into writing about an already fully formed literary character. Everyone laughed when Austin introduced himself on his first night. He made out he didn’t understand why, and it was explained they were all writing stories about an ‘Austin Quinn’, Dunleavy de Boston’s fictional ‘Austin Quinn’. 4And now they had their own real Austin Quinn in their circle. Austin didn’t tell them he wasn’t real and there was nothing accidental about his name. He’d known about their writing exercise before he joined and chose the name intentionally. It may have been the only time there was any laughter in the group, but not all had laughed. Some demurred, which required acting. Some wiped sweat from their foreheads with tentative fingers. Some adjusted clothing but to no purpose. Some felt diminished, grey, and looked down, and pinched their fleshy arms.
Austin fell in love with Sophie, as Austin Quinn, and this caused a complication for him and Sophie because his name was not Austin Quinn, and Sophie knew this.
But all that was long ago, and now Austin no longer attended The Writers Circle. He was beyond that. Austin missed Sophie. Sitting at his desk in his apartment, Austin thought of the absence Sophie had left in his life—a gigantic black abyss, an absence bigger than her presence. It made no sense. Right now though, Austin could taste her open lips. Her lips tasted of rockmelon. He thought of making love to her, caressing her, attending to her, then after, wrapping her in a white silk mantle. He thought of the female black widow spider eating the male after sex. After sex with Sophie, Austin knew he would have felt bereft, dislocated, lost, not himself, as though making love to her would have put quotation marks around his life and left him suspended and mute. Intimacy with Sophie would have shone a vivid beam on his life and exposed to him what it wasn’t, rather than what it was. It was as though the intimacy acted as an inflection point to reinforce what he knew—that he barely existed, that what existence he tried to grasp was fictional, imaginary at best, and was only present in her company. Intimacy with Sophie would drain from him what little there was to drain. He didn’t tell Sophie any of this, but he wished he had. She would have been gentle, and she would have smiled at the poetics of it, and she would have made him feel three-dimensional, and he could have told her who he was, although she already knew. She would have reassured him with her touch. One time, she told him he was her favourite character and, in so many ways, she told him she loved him. She used the word ‘character’ like people use the word ‘person’. He lost her, but his enduring memory of Sophie resulted in a feeling of gratitude. After he admitted to himself, he loved her, Austin disappeared from her life. He had to. He would have accepted her devouring him after sex.5
Austin walked past the Stalwart from time to time during the day, but not as Austin Quinn. He walked past as himself, and he may have imagined making love to Sophie. The melancholic sound of a double bass wafted through his open window as it did most nights. The low notes reminded him he was alone with his terrors, alone with too much information about himself. Alone.
***
Austin’s loneliness enclosed him like a fragile but stoic chrysalis. The cause of his loneliness was non-specific. His loneliness was his own, like everyone was lonely in his or her own Tolstoy way, but in this great eastern seaboard city, loneliness in all its incarnations was part of the fabric. It was omnipresent, like the heat. People expected it. They accepted it. Loneliness clung to your skin with a faint iridescent glow. You could feel it. You could sense it. It oozed from the buildings. If a laceration were gouged down the side of any of the city’s silver skyscrapers, Austin thought, it would bleed loneliness. Loneliness was the city’s blood. The people were its erythrocytes, leucocytes, and platelets (thrombocytes), and each had their job. Austin googled platelets—they were the blood cells that formed part of the clotting system—they prevented people bleeding to death by sacrificing themselves to form a clot, then a scab. Still, things could go wrong. Austin felt some sympathy for the noble platelet taking one for the team. Austin had manicured nails and cherry-black eyes and platelets ready to die for him. He had a constant trepidation that he was on the verge of disappearing, and he was fearful, but hopeful. His survival, such as it was, depended on vigilance—everlasting vigilance. He typed this on the white screen, then after a moment or two, deleted it. Then he typed eternal vigilance. Then he typed:
What will happen to you, Austin?
He left the cursor at the end of the sentence, pulsing, waiting, ridiculing. He deleted his name, it didn’t look right, and it did no work. If he was to disappear, where would he go? Who would he be? Would he be someone else? Would he be better? Would he take his platelets with him? Would he find that ‘wherever you go, there you are’?
He started typing the opening paragraph again.
The city rested during the swelteri…
Robbie Carton
Robbie sat in his cubicle pretending to examine a column of figures until his eyes blurred. ‘Pretending’ was how Robbie spent a lot of his time—it was how he survived his day. He popped an antacid from the tin on his desk. He chomped down hard on the tablet. Snapping the tablet in two with his teeth produced an audible crunch. Robbie looked up and glanced to his left then to his right across the rows of cubicles, but no-one appeared to have noticed the sound, or if they did, they didn’t show any signs of it bothering them, and it, the ‘crunch’, failed to disrupt the unrelenting accounting activity going on in the department. Robbie wasn’t surprised that no one noticed—he preferred no one did, especially not Bentley.
Robbie Carton was a twenty-nine-year-old accountant with a slim build, a mop of black stylishly untidy hair and quiet dark eyes. He had clear pale unblemished skin and a boyish smile which wasn’t often seen. He worked in a large mining company with offices and mines all over the world. Robbie didn’t bother himself with the global reach of the company. He rarely thought about it and when he did think about it, he knew he was only pretending to think about it. What he did think about was how anxious being in his cubicle made him feel. He looked up to see if anyone else on the floor was showing signs of feeling anxious. He couldn’t tell. He popped another antacid out of habit. He found the crunch satisfying on some primal level. ‘Crunch’.
‘You lose things, Carton.’ This was Bentley Herbert, Robbie’s supervisor. Bentley was three plus years older than Robbie, but Robbie thought, no wiser by any measurable measure—maybe Bentley was taller by a centimetre 7or two, with nostrils that flared at you at the end of his sentences. Bentley didn’t wait for a response to his claim that Robbie lost things. The phone on Bentley’s desk rang and he returned to his cubicle to answer it. Robbie felt some relief. Robbie had no response to Bentley’s accusation—however vaguely plausible it sounded the moment Bentley said it. Robbie hoped no one else nearby on the floor had heard the annoying Bentley. Robbie had no idea what he’d lost, or if he did lose things, or how serious ‘losing things’ might be in life. He had no clue as to what Bentley was talking about. This worried Robbie. And this meant now he was worried as well as anxious. Robbie’s degree of anxiousness was multi-layered, multi-dimensional, multi-faceted and probably ambidextrous, even multi-ambidextrous, he mused. The word Panic, typed in bold italics, but not with quotation marks, was pinned to his partition at eye level just above his laptop. Robbie Carton wanted more for himself and more from himself.
To be precise, Robbie Carton was a reluctant accountant—and so he delighted in anarchy, though as an accountant, anarchy made Robbie uneasy. But precision, he could handle. Existence also troubled him. He knew he was an accountant, ‘but how do you know you exist?’ He asked this question of anyone handy, but usually when he was drunk or well on his way to being drunk at the Stalwart pub most Friday nights.
He sent his question about existence out in an email to selected people in the office. He received no reply. He wasn’t expecting any. Robbie, according to anyone who knew him, was squandering himself. Robbie agreed. The problem was that no one, himself included, knew what particular talents he might possess, if he possessed any at all. Indeed, being an accountant didn’t amount to a talent of any note, he supposed. Other-self (his internal voice) was sure he was a talent-free zone. Robbie, on this matter, had to agree with other-self. Usually though, Robbie disagreed with other-self—it was dangerous to do otherwise. Other-self was a self-proclaimed actual anarchist, not a pretend anarchist like Robbie. Other-self was always trying to make trouble for Robbie.
So the question remained as to how these ‘talents’, if they did exist, might be used to the good of himself, or on a grander scale, to the good of the planet. Robbie’s anxiety multiplied—not only did he have to worry about losing things, he also now had to worry about not using his ‘talent’, whatever it may be.
At the Stalwart pub on Friday nights, when Robbie had drunk too much, 8he would argue on the question of existence. ‘Let’s say you don’t exist,’ he would regale to no one in particular, ‘then why would you “not exist” as an accountant, for crying out loud? Why not “not exist” as a matinee idol, or the inventor of the cure for cancer, or Mick Jagger and so forth? You get my drift? The fact that I’m an actual plodding accountant is insistent proof I must exist, or not, yes? I mean, it’s an absurdity, is it not?’
He didn’t expect an answer—he knew there was none. He was drunk and aware he was slurring his words. He also knew no one was listening. He knew Sophie Fanshawe couldn’t hear his extemporaneous mumbling over the din in the pub while she tended the bar. He knew the two other regulars sitting along the bar from him would not indicate they had heard what Robbie had said—they feared engagement with a drunken accountant. They were drunk themselves and never spoke except to order their drinks, and even then, they would only scrape a finger on the beer mat or tap their empty glass once. Robbie both admired them for it and was frustrated by it.
The degree of love Robbie felt for Sophie Fanshawe increased in direct proportion to his inebriation. He could graph it if he put his accountant mind to it—love intensity versus degree of inebriation. He knew that thinking about graphing something as absurd as this confirmed his accountant credentials, and this depressed him, and caused him to order more drinks. Robbie hated being an accountant. Robbie hated being Robbie. Drinking at the Stalwart on Friday nights liberated Robbie from the tedium of both being Robbie and an accountant.
As was his habit, he pencilled the word ‘Panic’ above the column of figures on the sheet of paper in front of him and slid it into his outbox for Bentley to collect. Robbie glanced over at Bentley, who was still on the phone. Bentley was a surreal character, according to Robbie. If Bentley was surreal, that would mean everyone else in the department must be normal by comparison. Robbie thought that seemed improbable. Robbie argued Bentley would be hard to invent if he hadn’t already existed—hard to invent, but not impossible. Bentley had heard Robbie’s dissertation on ‘existence’ many times. Robbie had no idea where Bentley stood on the subject, but then neither did Bentley—for Bentley, according to Robbie, such notions were not the natural terrain of accountants. Bentley would have considered it a risky proposition to look too long and closely into such ideas, or into the abyss, as Robbie described it. Bentley was true to his profession and, as such, risk-averse—‘risk’ being an anathema to an accountant, but not to Robbie. 9Robbie liked to think he was a risk-taker, even though that seemed not to be the case. Do risk-takers suffer from anxiety? Probably not, he had to admit.
On the rare occasion Robbie trusted himself, he thought that Bentley might be the sanest person he knew. That scared Robbie, who had legitimate concerns regarding his own sanity. According to other-self, Robbie’s hold on sanity and reason was a joke. Robbie was inclined to agree. Robbie didn’t smoke or wear singlets, but other-self did, and Robbie had no clue as to why.
Robbie was best described as forlorn. A man who lived alone in a one-bedroom rented flat in an inner-city suburb and worked during the day adding and subtracting numbers. At night, he could see the lights of his office building in the city from his apartment. During the day, Robbie could see his dark apartment from the east side of his office floor. Apart from Friday nights at the Stalwart, Robbie’s life consisted of being in one of two places—his apartment, or his office. Wherever he was, he was looking at wherever he wasn’t.
Robbie lived his life trying to minimise his discontent. In his apartment, Robbie kept little in his fridge apart from some bottled beer and the occasional half-empty container of leftover takeaway curry. He longed to find meaning in what seemed an absurd world, but so far, exhaustive examination had not revealed anything of substance, meaning-wise. ‘Absurdity abounds, but meaning is in short supply,’ he would often say. Nonetheless, he continued to hope that meaning did exist but so far he had failed to unearth any, especially in his department.
Bentley Herbert was still talking on his phone and, in his odd way, represented ‘meaning’, well, a kind of meaning, Robbie argued—the kind that tends to define something, in this case meaning itself, by not defining it. Robbie devised the notion that Bentley’s meaning defined meaning more from what it wasn’t than from what it was—its absence more than its presence. In the same way that a hole is defined by what’s around it. This frustrated Robbie, as did many things, Bentley being prime among them. Robbie suspected there was a good chance meaning existed in his apartment, but whenever he opened the door, it disappeared. Meaning disappeared, not the door, or the apartment. Robbie added this for his own amusement—he loved a dangling modifier. Robbie was left with trying to find meaning in a fluid world, in particular, in a fictional world where you could reinvent yourself, if only temporarily. He worried though, that if you reinvent yourself, would you be someone else or still the same person? Could you be someone else? You would look the same. You would sound the same. Other-self was 10all for giving reinvention a try. Robbie typed, ‘Absurdity abounds, but meaning is in short supply’, and sent it as an internal email to Bentley. Bentley ignored it. Robbie followed up with, ‘If your boomerang has come to the end of its usefulness, how do you throw it away?’ Bentley again made no indication he had read Robbie’s email, but Robbie knew he had. Bentley read all of Robbie’s emails. Robbie sent a third email with the statement, ‘I’ve thrown my colander out, it leaked like a sieve, or like a colander.’ Again, no facial response from Bentley that Robbie could discern.
At this moment, Bentley Herbert was back and standing right behind Robbie. Bentley was dressed in body-hugging, iridescent green lycra. He was holding some files, a black bike helmet and his New England red lunchbox with the words ‘Grafton Village Cheese Company’ written on two of its sides. On one of the sides, the first letter of each word was missing. Such things exhausted and confounded Robbie. Robbie spent an inordinate amount of time being confounded by things that most other people wouldn’t notice, or if they did, they wouldn’t choose to be confounded by them. Robbie did, but it wasn’t as though he had a choice.
‘Did you hear me, Carton? I said you lose things.’
Robbie still had no immediate answer to Bentley’s accusation and felt his stomach clench because he couldn’t fathom if Bentley was joking, being sarcastic or deadly serious. It wasn’t lunchtime, so why was Bentley carrying his lunch box? Robbie had no idea.
‘I heard you the first time,’ Robbie mumbled.
What had he lost? Did he lose things? Robbie worried about tone and inference. He had trouble reconciling these things. He didn’t have any idea what Bentley was talking about, but it caused him to feel tense. He hated feeling tense, almost as much as he hated feeling forlorn, which was pretty much his default state, along with exhausted—tense, forlorn, exhausted, that was how Robbie felt most of the time. And now confounded.
‘I was thinking about it, riding my bike, on my way in this morning. Yeah, you lose things.’ Bentley Herbert said this with considerable smugness, as though he had found the key to Robbie. ‘I don’t know what will happen to you, Carton. I really don’t.’ Bentley, repeating the statement, reiterated each word with a strange emphasis on the word ‘will’ and with lengthy pauses between each word. ‘What Will Happen to You?’ Robbie assumed Bentley had capitalised the first letter of each word. Sweat formed on Robbie’s brow. He felt light-headed.11
Bentley spoke to himself and for his own amusement with a rhetorical flourish, though Robbie would argue that a rhetorical flourish was beyond Bentley’s remit. Robbie felt there was an implied threat underpinning Bentley’s words, but wasn’t sure Bentley meant it that way or was even capable of such a thing. Nonetheless, Robbie felt threatened. And why had Bentley Herbert been thinking about him on his way to work? Tense, forlorn, exhausted, confounded and now worried and threatened, that was Robbie Carton in a nutshell. Robbie, for his own amusement, emphasised the word ‘nut’ in ‘nutshell’ but it provided no tangible relief.
‘It’s a worthy question and one you should ponder on, Carton. What will happen to you?’ Bentley repeated to Robbie, who was at that moment in a land far, far away.
Robbie added to his stream of thought and typed the following words, What Will Happen to You? A Novel by Robbie Carton. The problem with this though, Robbie thought, as good a title as it was for a novel, was that it begged the question of how was he to write a novel with a title that asked a question he had no idea how to answer? That would indeed be a mystery novel, even to its author. Robbie considered the title for a second or two, and on the screen, removed the question mark. What will happen to you. Robbie typed the following question: When a sentence is obviously a question as this one is, are not question marks redundant?
Robbie typed this up and sent it as an email to Bentley even though Bentley was standing behind him. Robbie thought to strike-out the question mark after ‘redundant?’ but he couldn’t.
Bentley, not a man to be distracted, nor one to concern himself with repetition, repeated, ‘What will happen to you, Carton?’
Robbie knew Bentley would use a question mark because it was a grammatical rule. Bentley repeated the question on his way back to his cubicle, but with a grin in his demeanour, as though he had Robbie ‘bang to rights’, as they say on British police procedural shows. Robbie couldn’t think of a reply, and this further unsettled him, and like anyone in an unsettled state, it was difficult to think of a good riposte, to use a word Bentley would favour. Robbie felt buzzy and nauseous. He hated feeling like that at work, or in his flat, or anywhere for that matter.
Later, for the sake of the exercise, Robbie mumbled Bentley’s words to himself, ‘What Will Happen to You?’ And then he typed, What Will Happen to You, Robbie? Robbie deleted his name. It didn’t look right, and 12it did no work, but some names do. Some names do a lot of work, but that was a topic for another time. If he disappeared and reinvented himself in another universe, he’d like to say to people, ‘Call me Ishmael. You haven’t seen a white whale anywhere, have you? A friend of mine is missing one.’ This assumed that in the reinvention of himself, he retained his sense of the absurd—he would also hope not to lose things as Bentley had forewarned. But then it wouldn’t matter because he would be in another universe, where Bentley wouldn’t be. Robbie wondered if Bentley’s absence would loom larger than his presence, or the other way round. Confounded again, Robbie popped an antacid and closed his eyes.
Robbie had a habit. He wrote random notes in a secret file on his computer, which was what he was doing when Bentley stopped behind him and accused him of losing things. The notes he kept in his secret file were about events and people and himself, but mostly his random thoughts. Sometimes they accumulated into micro stories—several micro stories. Robbie had no idea how this happened. He wondered if other-self had anything to do with it. Some of these thoughts Robbie might one day use in his novel, should he ever get around to writing one. A novel, any novel, he contended, was meant to be a stand-alone universe. His universe was far from ‘stand-alone’. He felt it was savagely unstable. Robbie’s universe lacked a central core. It was in a heightened state of near collapse, so he held little hope that he could write a novel given his limitations in his universe, such as it was. He also contended that writing a novel would take so much out of you, change you so much, that at its completion, you would be a different person—you would disappear as the author. He thought writing a novel might be one of the most dangerous things you could do. So, if not a novel, he thought, then he might consider writing a play, but he had no idea how to start such a thing. He typed What Will Happen to You? A play by Robbie Carton but it didn’t make any more sense than it did as a novel, and seemed no less dangerous to its author. He thought, for the sake of this exercise, he might concentrate on writing micro stories, maybe a book of micro stories, but then he figured this would be harder than writing a novel, or a play, where you only needed one central idea. A book of micro stories would need many potent ideas, and he had none. He had a lot of micro stories, but none of them contained potent ideas, he didn’t think. He could write something around Bentley or Sophie Fanshawe, or any number of characters he came across in his daily toil, but he was too exhausted, and he worried that it might change him into 13something, or someone, that might scare him, like a monster perhaps? Or perhaps it might reveal the monster he was.
For the amusement of all, himself in particular, Robbie truncated Bentley’s last name to Bert. He did this because he knew it annoyed Supervisor Bentley Herbert and Bentley couldn’t say it did because that would mean it did. To prove his childish petulance, as if he needed to, Robbie sometimes extended the truncated Bert to Bertram, or ‘The Bertram’ or ‘The Bentley Bertram’ or ‘The Bentley Bert’ or his pièce de résistance, ‘The Bent Bert’. It all depended on his mood, or how unbusy he was at the time.
He typed Unbusy on a blank screen and watched the cursor pulse. He continued typing.
‘Unbusy’. Being ‘unbusy’ was the preferred state of the fluctuating forty or so accountants who worked in the department. ‘Unbusy’ wasn’t just being idle, it was far more sophisticated than that—‘unbusy’ was when you were busy not achieving anything productive but looked as though you were. Accountants understood this concept and admired it in other accountants.
Robbie stopped typing.
In and around bouts of ‘unbusy’ periods, Robbie’s main job was to reconcile expense accounts across the mining company’s distant divisions. That was pretty much all he did, outside of annoying Bentley, which he saw as his real job, if not his life’s work. When he wasn’t a bored accountant, he was a cinephile and a bookophile, or a hyperlexiphile, whatever the term was for someone who loved reading. If you loved reading, wouldn’t you know what the term for excessive reading was? Robbie often imagined himself as the literary figures he read about. It was a way of getting through his day. On any given day or night, he spent hours being Patrick Bateman from American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis and pictured himself taking an axe to some of the accountants, and thus purging the world of several number-cruncher types. Or Holden Caulfield, where Robbie would spend the day picking out all the phonies on the floor, starting with himself to be fair. Or Mark Twain, where Robbie imagined his desk was a raft floating through the aisles of accountants, or a white whale in a sea of accountants. Robbie did this often, but it left him feeling unsatisfied and still himself—still himself, wanting to be someone who wouldn’t have any pending files in his in-tray. No in-tray at all, much better.14
Robbie thought that absurdism was as prevalent as the air here, in the ‘Department of Nonsense’, a phrase Robbie favoured when talking about the office. Robbie’s somewhat athletic build defied the fact that he did no exercise and spent most of his spare time reading and watching films, and drinking at the Stalwart pub, or standing in the dark in his apartment being watched by the twinkling lights of the city, feeling alone and forlorn, tense, and exhausted. This was on a good day. He didn’t have good nights. All these activities, in their way, had a particular purpose. They abetted his desire to disappear and start again. He wished there was a ‘disappear’ button on his computer keyboard. He imagined being in the middle of working on a column of figures, or midway through a discussion with Bentley on something inane, like the previous conversation he had had with Bentley, with his finger poised over the ‘disappear’ button. Then when he couldn’t take it anymore, he’d hit the button and ‘puff’, he’d be gone in a ‘puff’. He imagined popping out of the miasma onto a beach in Key Largo or Madagascar wearing a colourful shirt and sporting a limp and needing a walking stick or finding himself on a tautologically frozen tundra in the black winter of a distant planet in another galaxy, somewhere where he wasn’t known by any of the aliens and could start again. Of course, he’d be the alien, so no change there.
He typed, Gone in a ‘puff’ but decided not to send it to Bentley. Gone in a puff. Not that anyone in the department would notice he was missing. That was how it was on the floor—accountants kept to themselves and would consider the business of someone disappearing not something they should concern themselves with, unless they coveted the empty cubicle because their own was not as well sited in the hierarchy.
Robbie felt that the one person in the department who might notice he had disappeared would be Bentley, his arch-nemesis, or maybe Gloria, who worked two cubicles away from Robbie, next to Bentley’s cubicle. Robbie looked over at Gloria. Her cubicle was smaller than Robbie’s. He could see her shiny hair above the partition—it was captured by her usual ribbon, which today, or at the moment, was white. Robbie was guilty of sniffing Gloria whenever the opportunity presented itself, like when she leant near him to discuss a file or walked past him and left a trail of her perfume for him to inhale. Gloria smelt exotic in a way that made Robbie think of white sandy beaches, cocktail umbrellas, exotic white drinks, and a red and white striped beach towel. Gloria was all accountant but also all ‘woman’. Robbie, together with all the other male accountants on the floor, and quite possibly one or two of the female 15accountants for all Robbie knew—wanted to ravish her, and Gloria knew that. In Robbie’s view, the word ‘accountant’ and ‘ravish’ should not appear in the same sentence. It implied a competency not ordinarily associated with accountants—male or female—according to Robbie.
Whenever Gloria swished past, everyone—the men in this case—would bite down hard on a knuckle, or a pencil, or a bone, or a car part, or whatever was handy, to keep themselves controlled. Not that they would do anything to embarrass themselves, but they might develop a line of sweat across the top of their lip for those who didn’t possess a pencil moustache or, worse, underarm damp patches might appear. The women in the department all eyed Gloria as she passed by, but no one knew what they were thinking—at least Robbie was sure he didn’t. Gloria excelled at rendering an excellent ‘swish’. As she swished down each aisle with her practised rhythm, it was like a Mexican wave of accountants—all, in turn, bending after her like flowers following the sun.
Gloria was smart, very smart, and universally understood to be destined for advancement in the department. She was already Bentley’s deputy. Robbie found the juxtaposition of how smart she was with the way she looked, a conundrum—another conundrum in a life full of conundrums or conundra, as Bentley would mischievously point out, even though the dictionary cited ‘conundrums’ as the plural of conundrum because conundrum was not a Latin word, which Bentley would smugly reveal having suckered you into believing what he just said. ‘Conundrums is the plural, not conundra. It’s not Latin, you fatuus [fool].’ This was Bentley at full throttle. It was unspecified as to why or how Bentley knew any Latin, but he did, and he used it to make you look like an idiota—Latin for idiot, as he would disclose. Bentley could only be tolerated in exiguis—small amounts—Robbie thought. Robbie had looked up exiguis.
‘Well, Carton, what will happen to you? Or have you left us for one of your fantasy worlds?’ Bentley was back again, standing behind Robbie. Perhaps he’d never left. He repeated his question and laughed nervously to himself. Bentley, according to Robbie, had an infinite capacity to find himself amusing.
‘This is a fantasy world,’ Robbie muttered to himself.
Bentley remained behind Robbie. Bentley had primitive social skills, Robbie thought, and standing behind someone and waiting for a reply to what Robbie was sure was a rhetorical question, while others watched or 16tried to ignore the situation, wouldn’t have occurred to Bentley as being bizarre, or embarrassing, or peculiar, or socially inept. Robbie wished Bentley would disappear along with the heat of embarrassment, which had risen to the top of Robbie’s scalp and hovered like a heat-induced mirage over a dirt road in the middle distance on a hot outback day—Robbie enjoyed an overworked metaphor. Robbie searched his keyboard but failed to find a ‘disappear’ button labelled ‘Bentley’.
‘I heard you Bertie, loud and unclear.’ Robbie tried to sound breezy and unperturbed by what Bentley had said, but he’d lost control of his voice, and it sounded too high. He didn’t turn around to face Bentley, and he felt there was more agitation in his demeanour than he intended or wanted. This agitation escalated and graphed itself up to a more strident form of agitation, and the problem with that was Bentley might interpret it as proof he had gotten under Robbie’s skin, which he had, but Robbie didn’t want Bentley to know that. Robbie minimised the secret file he had up on his screen. At that point, Bentley turned away and walked back to his cubicle, with another inane thought wandering around his mind. Bentley, according to Robbie, had the concentration span of a gate off its latch.
Robbie exhaled and thought it wasn’t the best start to his morning. Bentley had ambushed him, and Robbie preferred it the other way round. Robbie could smell warm cucumber sandwiches from somewhere in the department, but it didn’t help.
Gloria Penhale
Gloria understood the staff in the department. They were children. They were cowards. They were easily manipulated, and she knew she was smarter than all of them. She had one over-arching attitude to her fellow accounting colleagues—she had a warm affection for them. She considered they were redeemable in spite of themselves and their limitations. They limited themselves by their almost constant thoughts surrounding amusement, and accounting.
Gloria knew things about most of them, things they didn’t know about themselves. Gloria made it her aim to help them be the best version of themselves, where she could. It would be a better outcome for them and for the department. She saw it as part of her job.
Apart from this, and as good as she was at inspiring people, Robbie Carton wasn’t responding the way she had hoped—Robbie was a special case and she worried about him. Gloria was the second-in-charge in the department reporting to the department head, Bentley Herbert or the Bentster as he was affectionately known. When Gloria was a young girl, she put herself in charge of her younger sister and the other kids who lived nearby. She was a born benevolent manager of resources, and she considered the kids in the street she played with as her resources.
Austin Quinn
INT. AUSTIN’S APARTMENT—NIGHT
The ubiquitous torn city poster hanging on Austin Quinn’s wall showed how, on sunny days, the city had a sparkling harbour and commanding bridges. The breezy scene looked like the top of an enormous birthday cake. Yachts and ferries were racing across the dark blue icing and around the small island with its world-famous statue that might have been shaped out of foreign white chocolate. But this was how the city looked to the innocent—sublime, inviting, homogenised, and innocuous—grinning with decadent pleasure while shielding its malevolence. It was its own invitational poster. Austin had no idea how people prospered in the city. The city was about surviving, and if you didn’t survive, you were consumed. You were swallowed by the indifference and the failure of hope. The shadows closed in on you, and you lost shape.
Austin had always lived alone, apart from the nameless white bird he kept in a cage hanging from a purpose-built stand at the end of his sofa. It was his habit to keep the lights off. His dark apartment overlooked a small park with peculiar trees. Sitting at his computer, he ignored the growing pile of white and brown envelopes on the floor by the door. When he entered or exited, he stepped over the letters. He knew none were for him. Even when he wasn’t at home, the sound of the mail dropping through the letter flap and hitting the pile of letters on the floor was the only sound in Austin’s apartment, apart from a soft murmur at night. He needed sounds in the same way a baby chick needed to hear its mother’s heartbeat.19
After dark, a pulsing neon invaded his apartment with red, blue, and green hues. On and off. On and off. On and off—permeating his life, his thinking, his moods, his thoughts, including, he thought, his biology and indeed his persona. He was Austin, then he was not, then he was Austin—like night and day. Austin couldn’t see the neon sign from his apartment. He couldn’t say what the deflected light advertised. He didn’t know on any conscious level what its message was, but he knew it had one. Sometimes he imagined it said things like, ‘God Created Suicide’ or ‘Are You Prime?’ or ‘Vigilance’ or ‘Live Long Insurance’.
The neon flashed across his naked back. Austin felt sure he could feel it, although he knew he couldn’t. Perhaps the sign advertised camera equipment, or maybe a dark bar somewhere, where mouths distended, and lips jerked, and tongues clicked with sexual invitations. Austin didn’t know but thinking about it was transporting. Time, to Austin, was elusive and uneven. He bit off chunks of time, like he might a big apple.
The neon washed through his darkened apartment and provided the only light in the sparsely furnished room, apart from the steady white glow from his computer. When needed, he sometimes flicked on the lamp next to the sofa. The lamplight was a warm yellow, more luminous than an actual light source. Its prominent effect enhanced his silhouette. It darkened his face and made him feel like he was Dick Tracy. ‘Half hidden in dark contrasts under a yellow fedora,’ he mumbled. The lamp didn’t compete with the neon but added to the effect. For all Austin knew, the rest of the lights in his apartment might not work. In his apartment, questions remained unanswered, edges were blurred, cheeks were pale, lips were dangerously red, and nothing was as it seemed. It was its own world, and Austin preferred it that way. It was a world where he was one of the elements of the apartment, no more dominating than any other. Raindrops hit the glass and refracted the neon hues around the apartment. The rain outside ramped up the humidity and the white noise. Austin Quinn lived a film noir life.
When daylight infiltrated Austin’s apartment, it was void of human life. Like other people in the city, Austin preferred the shadows. The city’s citizens suspected that ‘things’ outside the shadows could kill you. The shadows were reprieve territory—demilitarised, non-political. Austin felt safe or safer in the shadows. Between the shadows, on the streets in the blinding light, real life—not the façade of city life—existed. Out there was where evil existed and danger threatened, where the way to survive was to look away, 20never meet the city head on. ‘No direct eye contact’ was the mantra of the bewildered citizens.
Safe in his apartment at night, or as safe as he could be, the neon flash and the muted city noises comforted Austin. The light and the sounds delivered the city’s stories to him in a subliminal coded pulse. The pulse penetrated his brain. He heard the plaintive noises associated with murders, torture, and muggings—city crime—and the greatest of all, the sob and body heave of underutilised human endeavour. He heard the screams and moans and cries of anguish. He felt the human desolation, the sex gasp and the loneliness of loneliness. He felt the weight of surviving. Austin acknowledged and feared the off-stage declarative laughter. He absorbed the exasperation, the blind rage and, above all, the isolation. He felt the exhaustion of clinging hope. He felt the weight of this for himself and on behalf of everyone. For everyone in the city, hope was a lie, a con, an outright fraud. The city kept you in a state of sadness and punishing hope. You were expected to hope for relief, but none came, and this caused the sadness. The citizens knew hope would never solve anything, but no one spoke about it. If you gave up hope, you disappeared.
Austin felt the call to write the stories of the city, the baffling and, more often than not, desperate, disillusioned stories of its inhabitants. Writing the stories was the one uplifting thing in his life apart from the bird. The stories themselves were anything but uplifting.
He didn’t trust the city. Nonetheless, he had an affinity with it. No one trusted the city. Everyone, on a subliminal level, knew that the city was retributive. Ironically, or perhaps not, this city, in so many ways, was perfect, and the citizens celebrated this fact with forced rictus. The citizenry was nameless and anonymous to Austin, as he was to them. He accepted his anonymity in silence with an existential fear. If your existence was not acknowledged, how would your absence be noticed? At night, when he looked out the window of his apartment, down at the dark-cloaked inhabitants moving in slow motion below, he understood that none of them knew him. They didn’t know he watched them. They didn’t know he listened to them. They dreamt of a redeeming life, but they couldn’t admit this, not to themselves. And this was what Austin heard. He heard their muted dreams. He heard their futile hopes. On moonless nights, and when he allowed himself, Austin Quinn considered that ‘Austin Quinn’ was not his name and he was not Austin Quinn.21
Austin kept the bird in its cage away from the windows. He fed the bird every second day and made sure it had water. ‘H2O,’ he repeated over and over in the hope the bird would say it back to him, ‘H2O, H2O, H2O.’ He did this in case the bird should ever need water. But after a while he said it for himself and couldn’t stop repeating it for hours, until he went to sleep with a thirst and a dry mouth. Austin cleaned out the bottom of the cage every Saturday night at eleven pm. He didn’t know what kind of bird it was. It was white. It wasn’t a budgie or a canary. It was larger than those two species, and it didn’t ask for water. It had a red-and-white coloured crest and a yellow beak. It didn’t speak, sign or squawk. It made no noise at all during its waking day. Austin thought this might be because it had resigned itself to being alone. There was no other bird for it to attract with its song. It may not have understood there were other birds in the world—this was something Austin didn’t know. One of the tenets of the city was that caged birds and humans alike knew ‘we don’t know what we don’t know’.
Austin’s bird wanted for nothing, except for its freedom perhaps, but that was questionable because it wouldn’t have understood the concept of freedom since it had lived its life in a cage. Austin knew more than most that freedom could be terrifying. It might be the most terrifying concept in life. So maybe in resignation, or perhaps in protest, the bird remained silent except for a low murmuring sound it made when it slept at night. When it wasn’t asleep, it sat on its perch and rocked and stared into, what Austin referred to as, the abyss of the middle distance. Austin thought one day he might release it into the park below, but he worried that as the bird had been kept in captivity all its life, it might not know how to survive. He thought this of himself. And this applied to the city’s population. Austin came to realise that liberation can kill—freedom could be lethal. Only the true captive can know the terrors of freedom, and freedom can only be experienced by a true captive.
Austin unblurred his vision and focused on the cursor. He could taste the white screen hissing in his mouth. At that moment, in his dark apartment, at that precise time in his life, with his mouth open, Austin knew what would happen to him. He started typing.
Robbie Carton
Outside it was a bright sunny day. The sunlight penetrated the office windows and quelled and consumed the interior fluoro lighting of the department. The battle was on. Robbie knew that everyone in the department understood that it was Bentley’s mission in life to goad Robbie. A mission Robbie thought was, in Hamlet’s words, ‘more honoured in the breach than the observance’.
On one level, Robbie knew Bentley detested him, but on another level, he understood that Bentley wanted to be friends with him. Robbie had his suspicions about Bentley. He thought there might be more to Bentley than met the eye. On the other hand, there might be less. But Robbie knew he wasn’t the best person to make such a determination. One thing Robbie did know about Bentley was that he could not be accused of not caring. Robbie admired this in Bentley and tried to emulate this in his own quiet, disguised way. As it turned out, Robbie was so proficient with his quiet disguised behaviour that for all anyone knew or considered, Robbie couldn’t have cared less.
Robbie imagined a life for Bentley. Robbie imagined Bentley collected stamps and had a magnifying glass, and he polished brass late into his Saturday nights. And on the weekends Robbie imagined Bentley went bushwalking wearing a peaked beanie and carried sandwiches and a piece of fruit in a knapsack, perhaps a banana—definitely a banana. But Robbie couldn’t say for sure. Maybe Bentley photographed birds or identified a particular brand of car. The truth of it was, Robbie knew little about Bentley despite their having worked in the same department for seven years. What little 23Robbie did know about Bentley, Robbie had made up. Robbie opened a new screen and typed.
It was strange that sometimes, more often than you might think, what you had made up, or imagined, was the truth, or soon became the truth—or at the least, indistinguishable from the truth.
Robbie sometimes imagined Bentley as a fictional figure, not real like himself. Robbie wondered if he might have invented Bentley, written a backstory for him and developed him as his antagonist. But then that might be the biggest problem with Bentley, he was too real to be invented, even by Robbie.
Last Tuesday Robbie mischievously, and with exaggerated sincerity, said to Bentley, ‘Why don’t you try parting your hair on the other side of your head?’ Robbie knew Bentley had no idea how to take statements like that. Later that morning however, Bentley had slipped into the men’s room and parted his hair on the other side, and now it was standing on end, as Robbie predicted it would. This might be fashionable for a tortured sixteen-year-old dressed in black living in Melbourne near Palm Bay Florida, or in Llandudno, or in Tokyo under a bridge, but not so much for a thirty-three-year-old accountant supervisor for a multinational mining company, with the ability to flare his nostrils on demand. Still, Bentley was persistent with his hair because he wanted Robbie’s approval—and Robbie knew that about Bentley, or thought he knew it.
There were times when Robbie felt sympathy for Bentley, perhaps something bordering on affection. For a start, Bentley was the kind of guy you could trust if you were ever in a pinch. He was the guy you’d want next to you in the trenches before you go over the top. Robbie hoped that people might think that sort of thing about him too—although Robbie couldn’t see how you could easily get out of a trench. That aside, and because of thinking like that, he wasn’t sure he would be able to deliver if he was needed. To be that kind of person, you needed to be a romantic. Robbie, according to Bentley, was a cynic and cynics don’t generally believe in anything, especially romance. Robbie had to admit to himself that there was a lot to admire in the annoying Bentley, not the least of which was that Bentley was solid and a romantic, if not a fictional truth. And Bentley had great powers of concentration. Robbie was not confident about his ability to concentrate. Whenever Robbie tried to concentrate on a particular thought, or action, or 24matter, he found his mind wandering and questioning his ability to concentrate on any particular thought, or action, or matter.
‘Hair looks good, Bertie,’ Robbie said as he passed Bentley’s cubicle later that day. Bentley was looking at himself in a hand mirror while trying to smooth his erect hair with his hand. Bentley put the mirror down next to a bike pedal and reached for an antacid. Robbie patted Bentley on his shoulder. ‘Yeah, you look cool.’ Robbie knew Bentley never knew how to take him.
Robbie looked at the antacids and asked, ‘Can you spare one of those?’ Bentley offered up the Vegemite jar full of antacids, Robbie took one and popped it in his mouth. ‘Thanks, Mr B.’ Robbie wandered off affecting a feigned jauntiness. He was proud of this. He considered that the business of pulling off ‘jauntiness’ in one’s demeanour was hard enough, but to feign it was near impossible. He thought Bentley would be impressed and he hoped that Gloria might notice and admire his ability to render feignity, or feigness, and surely, she’d be impressed with his invention of these two new words. He sat down at his desk and felt the weight of the world crushing him.
Robbie’s jet-black hair was permanently untidy, which currently made him ‘on trend’, whereas until recently his untidy hair made him ‘untidy’, as it did for Bentley. Only in Bentley’s case, it was out of character. Now it seemed fashion had caught up with Robbie. Robbie felt unsettled by this. Not only by this. Many things unsettled him. Being unsettled, unsettled him. He felt a lightness in his tummy. Like everyone, Robbie dreamt of a different life for himself. He dreamt of a life he could understand. He dreamt of an exciting life, and he spent a lot of time thinking and designing what an exciting life might look like. At home in his flat at night, he liked to think he was someone else, and he was. But was he any better, or better off?
As annoying as Bentley was, Robbie envied Bentley’s contented demeanour. Bentley loved being an accountant, and Robbie thought you had to admire someone who loved being an accountant, whether or not his hair looked ridiculous. At least Bentley was what he wanted to be. And more impressive still, Bentley knew what he wanted to be.
While Robbie and Bentley tended to rub against each other in mutual irritation, they nonetheless spoke often because being at odds with each other sort of came with the territory, and everyone in the department was okay with that.
Robbie Carton and Bentley Herbert grind against each other like a ship against jetty pylons, back and forth with the slapping motion of the ink black sea. 25
This appeared as an anonymous email on everyone’s computer. Nobody disagreed with it. Nor did they own up to it or comment on it. Robbie thought it was overwritten and less than profound, although true enough.
