Sometimes (by which I mean, most times) I find it difficult to motivate myself to write. It's not that I don't enjoy writing, it's just that it seems to be one of those areas of my life that is smothered by an incomprehensible, suffocating phobia with no fixed dimension or form. It's like being afraid not of the dark, but of an absence of light. Or something.
So.
Living within a community of intelligent and creative folks who usually enjoy nothing more than assisting a casual experimentalist in his fun, I have started getting everyone to give me a list of words or sentences or things that I have to write a short story or poem about. These get left in my pigeonhole in an envelope sometime during the day, and I retrieve and read them about 5pm each day. I then have until dinner (which equates to roughly an hour) to put together some kind of narrative. I don't edit the stories, and upon reading them back, even the ones I like, I invariably discover flaws and typos and holes, but that's okay.
Sometimes this works out reasonably well and I write like a man possessed and don't look up until I smell dinner nearby. Sometimes I sit there writing and deleting and writing and deleting until I'm left with half a sentence, and then I close the computer down and pretend it never happened. However it works, I am greatly enjoying the inspiration and the practicality of writing like this each day, if anything it keeps my mind ticking over.
Here's the first story I wrote (a week or two ago) that I was happy with.
My parameters were:
1. A fishtank
2. A rich snob
3. The interior of the earth
The House Inspection
The doorbell rang and I leapt to my feet. It had to be her, nobody ever used the doorbell except her. My friends would always either knock (usually to the beat of whatever was playing through their headphones) or just walk right in. The door was rarely locked.
No, only Susan Rapperport rang the doorbell, and she probably did so with a gloved finger and a tissue on hand to clean the glove. She was fastidious, tedious and immeasurably odious. She was also my landlord.
I scanned the lounge room and found it satisfactory. Not pristine, but even pristine was never good enough for Slapperport, as I liked to call her (never to her face, naturally). No matter how spotless the room she would walk in and sigh in a way that suggested someone had just broken her heart, usually before she’d even looked at anything. A satisfactory state would at least save me a lecture.
The doorbell rang again and I called out, “Coming!” adding quietly to myself, “A word you probably don’t say very often, you frigid…Hi!” I finished up, opening the door and grinning like I was expecting a strip-o-gram. “Mrs. Rapperport, how lovely to see you again. Twice in one month, I feel very honoured.”
She looked down her nose at me, which I had to admit was a difficult thing for her to refrain from doing. Her aquiline honker reared out from between her eyes like a ship’s hull lurching from port, sharp and gleaming. It almost seemed to be smiling itself, probably trying to balance the fact that the bloodless pursed lips below it never did. Her eyes shrunk back from the head of her nose, burrowing their way down into their sockets as if to escape from the light. Her dyed-red hair was pulled back in a bun so tight I wouldn’t be surprised to see the skin around her cheeks tearing apart.
I offered her a hand in greeting. She pulled her own (gloved, of course) to her chest and pointedly ignored it. “I’m here for the house inspection,” she intoned superfluously, like I had taken leave of my senses and thought she might have shown up for a game of Twister. “May I come in?”
Before I could answer she swept her lilac silk scarf across one shoulder and pushed past me. She was a large woman, Mrs. Rapperport, and her shoulder sent me into the door frame like a football tackle. Wincing, I closed the door and followed her wobbling buttocks down the hall.
Mrs. Rapperport owned many houses in my suburb, and so far as I could gather she bullied every single tenant like this. It would almost have made me feel special to think I was her personal bug bear, but she seemed to thrive on constant inspections and harrowing lectures. I figured it was a class thing – her husband (may he rest in peace, although I harboured a morbid yet unrelenting fantasy that she had him stuffed in the freezer and was slowly disposing of the carcass one burger at a time) had pulled her from white collar servitude after a chance meeting in Darling Harbour, and his untimely death (heart attack on the stock market floor when a typo made him think he’d lost his entire fortune) and generous will left her set for life. Perhaps her constant needling of low-income tenants such as myself was her way of putting her past to bed. Of course, she may just have been the biggest bitch I’ve ever met.
“Gerald, there’s a stain on the ceiling in here,” she called loudly, even though I was right behind her. My name is actually Jerry, and it’s certainly not short for Gerald.
“That’s right Mrs. Rapperport, remember I told you about that last time? It’s got to do with that mould issue I was hoping you might…”
“Why is the carpet darker here?” she interjected. With Slapperport, you were to be seen but not heard. Every question was rhetorical, every conversation a monologue. You were nothing but a faceless audience.
“I, I don’t know,” I spluttered in disbelief. “It’s always been darker there, ever since I moved in.”
She was already in the kitchen though – she could sure as hell move fast for such a big girl.
“What. Is. This?” she growled, and that’s when I knew I was in trouble.
“Oh, that,” I laughed feebly, easing my way around her waist to fit into the small kitchen as well. “That’s, uh, that’s Oscar.”
I’m an animal lover, which doesn’t tend to go down too well in rental properties. There are always clauses about no cats, no dogs, no cause in any way, shape or form for fur or faeces to be left lying around to devalue the house. But so far as I could tell, I had never seen a clause outlawing fish.
The reason Slapperport’s jaw was swinging loosely from its joints, however, was that what I had wasn’t really just a fish. I’ve never been one to fit in with the crowd, and a cute little orange goldfish in a bowl isn’t really my style.
Last week, when I knew I had won the bid on Oscar (eBay is truly a market place to be reckoned with), I installed an eight foot tank into the kitchen. My kitchen’s not actually eight foot, so the tank extends out the door and into the backyard a little way. It’s not ideal, but it’s the only place I could fit the damn thing in the house, and Oscar needs to be kept out of direct light. I don’t really want to go into it here but he’s one of those deep sea things that have teeth bigger than its body and glow. He needs room to breathe, really, and the grass snakes he likes to eat tend to thrash about when I drop them in the water.
“I got him last week, isn’t he something?” I realised I was speaking a little too fast. “I’ve always been very careful with pets around here Mrs. Rapperport, I’m a believer in sticking to the rules, but I couldn’t help but notice there was nothing in the rental agreement about not keeping fish…”
“THAT,” she boomed, shooting a finely-manicured finger at the tank, “is not a FISH. THAT,” she continued directly into my face, possibly the first time she’d ever looked directly at me, “is a MONSTROCITY.”
Oscar glowed and gnashed his teeth a little, but then again, he always did that, so I wasn’t too concerned he’d been offended.
“No really, Mrs. Rapperport, he’s definitely a fish. I can pull out a marine encyclopaedia if you want to…”
She held up a hand as if to cast a curse upon me, and paced alongside the tank. Oscar followed her, his little eyes (well, he didn’t actually have eyes, having evolved in a place with no light, but I liked to think of the little black baubles above the fangs as being eyes. It made him a little easier to hang out with) tracing her every move. She turned her back on the tank to squish herself between it and the back door, and thankfully didn’t hear the thud of the glass as Oscar threw himself against it, fang-first.
This wasn’t so good. I was pretty sure I could talk her around with Oscar, but she’d never been to the backyard before and I hadn’t been entirely honest when I said I believed in sticking to the rules. I could only hope Rex stayed hidden in the ferns.
“I will be taking this up with the Tenancy Tribunal,” she snarled. “But first I want to see what else you’re hiding from me. You’ve probably a dog in your shed.” She turned and walked toward it, the ferns to her right.
I turned back to Oscar, making sure he hadn’t snapped a tooth in his futile attack, when I heard her scream.
Screams can be funny things, they rarely sound like the person they come from. Mrs. Rapperport’s scream was thick and curdled, almost like gargling salt water just as it slips down into your throat, despite your best intentions to keep it out of there. I spun around and there was Rex, one claw on her foot and a big, shit-eating grin on his face. I’m not being crude, he had almost certainly been eating shit.
I should probably let you in on something now, which is that when I say I like animals, I mean I like exotic animals. You would have picked that up from Oscar, but he’s probably one of my more conservative pets. Rex is…well, to be honest I don’t really know what Rex is. I won him in a drunken poker game one night in a friend of a friend’s place out in Prestons. Man, you want to see a creepy suburb, that’s Prestons. I call it “Deprestons”, but like I said, I was drunk. Anyway, Rex looks kinda like a komodo dragon, except a little smaller, and with two heads. He’s also jet black and has these little leathery wings folded up along his back, although I can’t say I’ve ever seen him use them. I suppose he’s probably a dragon of some description, but I also can’t say I’ve ever seen him belch out fire or anything. Usually he just likes sitting in the sun and eating shit. Just like a dog I had when I was a kid.
Mrs. Rapperport screamed again, and I reached down to collect Rex before he got scared and did something I’d regret, like bite her foot off.
“Um, this is awkward,” I began. “You see, I’m pretty sure whatever Rex might be is also not specifically banned on my rental agreement…”
Mrs. Rapperport was beyond reasoning though. She ran toward the shed, tears smudging her no doubt animal-tested make up as she went. This was most definitely not a good move.
“Mrs. Rapperport!” I yelled, “Can’t we talk about this?”
But I was too late. Her pudgy hand connected with the shed door with all the force of a battering ram and the old lock (which I really had been intending on fixing, later this week probably) bust apart like confetti at a parade. For a second I thought her bulk might be stopped by the narrow entrance but after a brief struggle she popped through (and now I think back on it the actual “pop” sound, like a cork, was probably only in my head) and disappeared into the dark.
There was no comical banging and clanging from inside, I keep my shed very clean. So clean, in fact, that there’s actually nothing really in there. Except for the hole.
I dropped Rex down (he wandered off to the kitchen to hiss at Oscar, they still hadn’t really become friends yet) and grabbed the hefty torch I kept on a chain outside the shed. I walked through the open door and shone the light down.
I’ve got to say I’m pretty proud of the hole. My parents used to tell me I was the laziest kid they had (and they should know, they had six), but I really worked hard on that hole. It took me four months of digging, and I spent at least a couple of hours nearly every single day on it. I had to do it by hand too, because you can’t just go boring down to the interior of the Earth with heavy machinery on a rental property, someone’s going to complain and then I’d have Slapperport on my back. Although I guess this is probably a moot point now.
I shone the torch down and let it play out on the large well that burrowed down, past where the light could reach. It was the most powerful torch I could find on the market, and it still didn’t reach all the way down. Didn’t I tell you it was some hole?
I don’t know why I looked, there was no chance I was going to see Slapperport again. I think I was just looking for anything left behind, maybe a gouge mark in the wall or something like that. A horrible image came to me then of the round Slapperport falling perfectly down that round hole like a golf ball into its home. I didn’t think that was very charitable of me, even if she was such a bitch.
Seeing nothing, I edged around the well and opened the large freezer on the back wall. I pulled out a frozen hunk of meat (okay, yes, it was a dog, but I prefer to just think of it as “meat”, it makes it easier to kill them) and threw it down. I’m pretty sure I heard a belching, but I can’t be sure. Coco likes to keep to herself down there.
