An Unusual Angle Read online

  Shut up!

  Well it would. It would shatter their world.

  There’s too much.

  Good.

  The critics love detail.

  There’s nothing like a frame packed full of tiny trinkets. Definitely the sign of a great director.

  Where would they bury it?

  In my brain.

  Chapter 5

  HOLIDAYS

  What else?

  Athletics carnival held on the oval and the public oval to the west and a few metres higher joined by a grassy slope where spectators lie in comfort reading and talking, and groaning at the inevitable feeble jokes from the inevitable electronic English teacher.

  The inevitable gut-grinding cheering-squads and telephallused photographers, the inevitable endless speech and nervous trophy ceremony, the inevitable garbage collection time.

  You see they only have one mould.

  Forget it.

  What else?

  School Council meetings dominated by Seward as he drafts his constitution and sits back and watches it work, under the supreme guidance of articles 12 and 13:

  12. Any motion may be vetoed without question by the Principal.

  13. The election of an executive officer will not be deemed to be official unless the office-bearer is approved by the Principal.

  As the camera dwells on these lines of the mimeographed sheet of the Constitution, the soundtrack fills with the voices of an enormous choir, singing (to the tune of ‘Stand Up for College’):

  Stand up! For the student councillors!

  Our Democratic Right!

  They are our true inspiration as

  They lead us in the fight!

  They are the perfect prototypes

  Of what we ought to be!

  So vote at the next election for

  The one approved nominee!

  What else?

  Very little.

  And the year shrinks due to cruel perspective and I have not even the most primitive reference grid.

  Near the very end there are picnics to sandy islands but they are not even worth putting on with a C-grade vampire movie.

  What else?

  The Very Last Day exactly mimics the Very Last Day of Term.

  You see they only have one mould.

  Seven weeks of holidays and I will go to London and Paris and New York and Montreal.

  Or perhaps Milan and Geneva and Berlin and Stockholm.

  Maybe Chicago and Minneapolis and Denver and Phoenix and Los Angeles and San Francisco?

  Confession: I will probably have to settle for the Grand, the Paris, and the Astor.

  Settle for?

  In the dark I cannot see the perfect rows of chairs or the intricate pattern of the carpet. I cannot see the people brought here by advertising who have bought tickets by giving money which has come to them by frighteningly tangled paths to the ticket-seller with a house and a front garden and a husband and children and a cat and two dogs.

  Two dogs? How excessive! Make it one and one half.

  I cannot see the torch of the usherette who has just broken up with her fiancé, who contemplated suicide but got smashed instead.

  I can see none of this if I look straight ahead at the flickering reflections which were designed and constructed with mind-boggling effort and thoroughness … just for me to look at.

  Why is the air-conditioning always just a little too cold?

  To remind the audience that they have real bodies sitting in real chairs in a real cinema in a real city in a real country on a real, solid planet. Otherwise there is the real danger that they will forget and get lost completely.

  It is my personal opinion that they showed a very good movie on the Marie Celeste that night.

  I’m not kidding. My mother knew a girl who fell into an Errol Flynn film and never came out.

  I’m only kidding.

  What else?

  Sleeping in late to eleven or even two, after being half-awake for two or three hours but too sickened by heavy, sweat-drenched skin and air to face the increased sensory inputs of consciousness, and so lying semi-dreaming of solving some problem, breaking some code, reaching some goal—and persuading my elbows to make the tiny but oh-so-hard movements needed to prop me up into a slit-eyed sitting position.

  For those first few seconds, the plot of the dream is clear, but it soon fades into inaccessibility.

  Why should I need to crack a safe or cross a desert just to wake up?

  My dreams are always some problem which I must solve before I can wake, and the worst part of it all is that once I am fully awake I can never remember either the exact nature of the problem or whether or not I succeeded in solving it.

  As far as I can tell, the problems are never anything to do with real life.

  I’m sure a Freudian would find it all terribly significant, but I never worry about anything I can’t record on celluloid.

  Not that it’s actually celluloid. That’s just an expression.

  What else?

  Orgies of reading, solidly, hour after hour, day after day, book after book, interrupted only by meals, sleep (mainly from five to eleven in the morning), and trips to the library.

  What else?

  Occasional enthusiastic decisions to study in detail electronics or physics or French or cryptography.

  They last about a day.

  And hence are not terribly successful.

  But they are lumps, if minor ones.

  What else?

  Occasional visits to the State Library to wander semi-aimlessly around, looking at obscure periodicals and sometimes chasing peculiar facts which are not likely to be found.

  Yet sometimes are.

  Such as Datamation’s opinion of Demon Seed.

  Flicking through huge heavy volumes of The New York Times Directory of the Film, a strangely masochistic activity for I violently disagree with most of the smug reviews, the snobbish put-downs, the obsequious eulogies. At least I keep my own muddled thoughts about films deep in my head; at least I admit to myself that they are only guesses and gut feelings.

  Cliché!

  So?

  Reading a review of Catch-22 makes me twitch and drool; even when the reviewer praises the film it seems more like an attempt to prove his own worth by advertising the fact that he can not only enjoy and appreciate the film, he can say exactly why it was good, exactly why it wasn’t perfect, what bits did ‘work’ and what bits didn’t.

  I guess it’s implicit that all this is just one man’s opinion. I hope it’s implicit. I doubt it.

  There are some things in the film that I wish he had resisted, such as images out of Fellini and a reference to Kubrick’s use of ‘Zarathustra’, which is also being used currently in a Swanson’s Frozen Foods television commercial.

  What a generous soul. In one small paragraph he grants exclusive rights to a piece of music to 2001 and, much more lavishly, grants exclusive rights to a type of scene to Fellini. That the images out of Fellini are really images out of Heller wouldn’t matter to him, he’s out to prove that he can recognise this sort of thing. I can imagine him sitting in the audience in the hotel in Stardust Memories and, after asking some long pretentious question showing off all the scraps of trivia and bullshit that have accumulated in his brain after all those years of trying to suck dignity out of other people’s creations, turning to a companion with a huge wink which says: that’ll screw him up nicely, that’ll show him who I am.

  What else?

  Occasional visits to book stores to wander semi-aimlessly around, looking at the latest SF paperbacks and sometimes buying one or two, never sure which I should buy, conned by the covers, wishing that they had a reading room.

  I suppose that’s not very likely, though.

  And laughing at the enormous displays of the latest best-sellers: How to Cure Migraines with Turnip Technology and The Do-It-Yourself Zodiac Book. And also poorly written novels based on the most popular currently screening films.
/>   And going upstairs to see the photography textbooks which are unbelievably expensive even when in paperback.

  And that sort of thing.

  What else?

  Half-starting a dozen short stories and novels but always giving up because after three re-readings everything I write always seems terrible. I suppose I shouldn’t read it all over and over again, but I have to check for typing mistakes and I never believe that I could have corrected them all in one reading. I’m paranoid about typing mistakes. When I type letters I always have a terrible feeling just as I drop the envelopes into the post-box … I am convinced that there must be a terrible mistake somewhere.

  What else?

  Reading the entire morning newspaper, every single article on every single page (but of course missing the advertisements; there are limits to every eccentricity), taking hours, and then regretting having done it because it was a complete waste of time: I can scarcely remember anything that I’ve read, and what I can remember is trivial and not worth knowing.

  I only do it about three or four times in seven weeks.

  What else?

  Looking out for interesting shots as I walk through the city surrounded by so many people. I have a whole library of mothers hitting children, old drunks leaning against buildings, executives out to lunch with young, beautiful secretaries. Public servants in business suits, looking so resigned. All boring and repetitious and predictable. Quite useless. But I keep them Just In Case an inconceivable application suddenly materialises.

  What else?

  Very little.

  And the holidays shrink due to cruel perspective and I have not even the most primitive reference grid.

  Near the very end there is buying books for the approaching school year but this is about as exciting as a Woolworths advertisement.

  I loathe advertisements.

  Especially the type which try to persuade the audience to believe that the product being advertised is responsible for or contributes to certain lifestyles.

  Need I name names?

  (What a corny thing to say. I beg forgiveness.)

  No, I will not give hints. That would be cowardly.

  Besides, everybody knows the bastards. Everybody.

  What else?

  On the night of the last Friday of the holidays I am walking down a very dark street which is especially dark because there are no street lights working for blocks in all directions due to some extremely accurate vandalism, and also although there is a moon the sky is completely overcast with thick clouds making the moon a hazy patch of light blue-grey against the rest of the clouds … they can be felt like a ceiling, even though it is almost too dark to see them.

  Someone is walking down the street towards me in the opposite direction to my direction. (The awkwardness of that sentence is a direct expression of my nervousness at walking down the very dark street. Just thought I’d mention that.) I don’t mind people walking down the street in the opposite direction, but I hate it when they walk in the same direction. If they’re behind me, I think they’re following me. (Not that I believe it … I just think it.) If they’re in front, I think they think I’m following them, and it’s even worse if they walk more slowly than I do, because then I catch up with them and have to pass them. Of course I could slow down to avoid this, but that would increase their suspicions about me following them.

  Mind you, I’m not paranoid. I just think everyone else is either paranoid or homicidal.

  Well as the person gets closer I see he is dressed completely in black and he is carrying a knife.

  I actually shiver. How amazing! People actually do shiver when something like this happens! I am quite excited to have confirmed it!

  He points the nasty-looking (It is extremely nasty-looking. It is plainly not new, and looks like he never cleans it, i.e. it has blood stains all over it. Help!) knife at me, and says:

  —Give me yer fuckin money or I’ll cut yer guts out

  in an almost-amusing-but-not-under-these-circumstances, very Australian accent.

  I have no money.

  I stand there thinking for a few milliseconds.

  I jump backwards, smoothed by slow motion, onto a conveniently positioned crate, and I face my attacker, pointing at him with an accusing finger (Cliché! Not now!), saying:

  —Would you kill me? Would you? Do you know who I am, do you have the faintest glimmering of an idea of the enormity of the act you contemplate so readily, so wantonly?

  He shakes his head dumbly, looks a little sheepish.

  —Well, I’ll tell you who I am!

  Now, in a booming, commanding voice:

  —I am the needle in the haystack, the two-headed penny, the albino lion! I am the Uranium-235 atom, surrounded by U-238! I am the tenth consecutive royal flush; I am the die which lands balanced on its edge … NO! Balanced on its corner! I am the misprinted stamp, the two-headed otter, the stallion with a star on its nose! I am the failing failsafe, the possible impossibility, the repeated unrepeatable! I am the piano plant, the Elizabethan furniture mine, the five-hundred-storey skyscraper that grew unaided out of the ground! Do you understand me! I am unique!

  Short cut to fantasy sequence:

  He drops his knife as the realisation hits him; he turns and runs screaming down the street.

  Short cut to fantasy sequence:

  He looks up with growing comprehension, says:

  —Yes, I see now. And every human is unique, so life is a very sacred thing. From this day onwards, I will pay it due respect.

  Actually, he says:

  —Shit, mate, you’re some kind of a freak!

  and walks off whistling.

  Well, at least it worked.

  If not in the way I expected …

  And I didn’t even have any money to protect … there was nobody else around to save.

  My life is not too hot as far as dramatic incidents are concerned.

  I throw away the film of the incident, flush it away. Why, when I keep so much boring trash? I don’t know. Either way, I think I’ve made a fool of myself again.

  Unintentionally, that’s the annoying aspect of it. I don’t mind mocking myself if it’s all planned, but when I’m trying to be serious …

  It would have been better if he’d knifed me.

  And that’s a very depressing thing to say.

  And I lose confidence in my ability as an actor for nearly five minutes.

  Good.

  Everybody needs a little humility.

  Oh shut up.

  I walk home whistling the music from Zardoz, which is a fairly simple tune but it sounds very profound.

  When played on the right instruments.

  But it is mournful and I want to cheer up, so I change to the theme music from The Trap, which is vigorous and rousing and easy to whistle.

  As I walk, the invisible hemispherical ceiling above me moves too, keeping me at its centre.

  And I am flattered.

  And a little scared.

  Because it is following me.

  I close my eyes and stretch my arms out in slow motion. I grow rapidly until I am nearly as high as the hemisphere of cloud that follows me, and then my fists break through the fragile porcelain backing on which it is painted.

  It shatters and scatters on a wind which points away from me in all directions.

  I shrink quickly.

  Then I open my eyes. Faint in the darkened moonlight, but the clouds are still there.

  Nobody can say I don’t try.

  —You don’t try

  says the red-eared rabbit running down the road.

  —Stew you!

  I yell angrily.

  —Try it!

  retorts the rabbit.

  I let him go.

  Nobody can say I’m not kind to animals.

  —You’re not kind to animals

  I hear him yell from a distance.

  —Oh, funny bunny!

  I scream back.

  Should be on
a leash.

  Oh shut up.

  Chapter 6

  HUMOUR

  Annoyingly, as I walk diagonally across the oval (Isn’t life a vast, colourful tapestry of ever-changing events? No. It’s extremely bland.) I am torn between an impulse to grin broadly, but it’s an impulse) and the restraint of the impulse due to the feeling that it makes me look absurd (It does. I once grinned broadly (quite by mistake, I tripped on a banana skin) into a mirror then laughed at myself for five minutes and hiccupped for fifteen.).

  Annoyingly, I begin to resonate, grinning broadly for a few seconds, then looking extremely sober for a few seconds, in a hard-to-get-out-of cycle. I soon realise that this must look even more ridiculous than grinning broadly continuously, but I can’t bring myself to do that. I try to stay sober-looking, but then I start to remember scenes from Silent Movie and The Last Remake of Beau Geste and Annie Hall and I just have to grin broadly again.

  Annoyingly, I have this terrible problem when I have to look serious. I always begin to remember scenes from comedies. Whenever I’m speaking to a teacher about something serious, and especially when I’m being chastised, I start to remember the words to ‘Everybody Ought to have a Maid’ from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and I have to fight with all my strength to stop my eggshell-like expression from bursting with laughter. That’s one difference I find between the students and the teachers: you could easily explain something like that to a student, but never to a teacher. Even the most broad-minded, good-humoured teacher just could not understand. They think that we can switch our moods to suit them, control our souls for the circumstances. Throttle yourselves now, they are saying, because there is no laughter in the offices, the factories, the dole queue. Laugh at your superiors and starve.

  I’m growing morbid.

  Annoyingly, during English comprehension exams, I always find the passages and the questions incredibly funny. I sit there, waiting to roar with laughter, to roll on the floor, to cry buckets of hysterical tears, waiting for some sign that I am not alone, but the room stays silent but for the sound of eyeballs scanning lines. I wait a few minutes, to be sure that everybody in the class must have read the amusing section, hoping for a quiet giggle or a controlled snicker, but there is nothing. Maybe if I dared to laugh there’d be a chain reaction, but I am no courageous pioneer. I fear detection.