That famous black-and-white King Kong film from the 1930s was playing silently on the TV. I was sat at the living-room window, back to the screen, looking out upon a street which was dimly lit by a cloud-covered sun.
Before my young eyes, one of nature’s more beautiful tantrums unfolded majestically that afternoon. It was a dazzling winter storm. Its driving rain drummed against the tin-roof of our little weatherboard home, creating a pleasant din that rendered the Scotch-Finger biscuit I was eating, somehow sweeter.
The storm was painted in greys and blues that moved and shifted with the wind. The fluffy clouds were tall and stiff like meringue. The trees whipped back and forth like a conductor’s staff at the climax of a symphony. A steady stream of shallow water charged by on the wide suburban road.
The cacophony outside was dampened by degrees, by the insulating effects of our suburban home. I felt safe and warm. But safety (as per the catchy SureEnough Burglar-Alarm advertising jingle that I'd heard a million times in the car on the way to school) is ‘just an illusion, without a SureEnough Burglar alarm installed in every home in Australia’.
We didn’t have an alarm.
The scene outside my window roared and whistled, hollered and screamed. It shook our home, as if to deliberately imply that the SureEnough corporation was correct; that safety was indeed an illusion.
I waited for lunch.
The occasional boxy sedan struggled by, along the sodden tarmac, headlights on uselessly against the wash and tumult of the rain. A fat man in one such sedan was singing in that unchecked way people will when they are confident they aren’t being watched. Even as the pelting rain obscured the man’s view of the road, he drove on.
He tapped the steering wheel to the rhythm of The Bangle’s smash single, Manic Monday. He bopped and shrugged and bounced like a chirpy seal waiting for a hunk of fish-head. He did all of this because he was scared. Scared of rain, scared of storms, scared of lighting and thunder. Ever since he was a boy (the same age I was then, looking out the window that day in 1987) Tony was scared of storms.
So he turned up the music louder, tapped his hands harder and danced to the fullest extent permitted by the cabin of his car.
I obviously wasn’t able to hear Tony’s radio that afternoon. I could not have read Tony’s thoughts or watch Tony’s little distraction dance.
I was just a boy, sitting in my lounge room, half-watching an cheesy old movie about a big ape terrorising New York.
I could barely hear what was happening in the next room, let-alone in a boxy sedan, driving by more than twenty meters away from me, at speed. But as the narrator of this particular story my powers of observation are infinite.
So trust me when I say that Tony had no reason to worry about the storm. I may not have known it then, but Tony wouldn’t live very much longer. He would die two street away, after stopping on the side of the road to wait out the storm. I could even tell you who killed him, but you wouldn’t believe me if I did. Not yet anyway.
At the same moment Tony drove by my window, my (little) brother and (even littler) sister, Ari and June, wrestled each other for a toy neither wanted. They did so quietly, so as to respect the moment I was having. I heard a pan clank into the sink. I turned to see my mother, head craning around the kitchen wall, to watch the television screen just as Kong gently lifted the beautiful Anne Darrow from the ground with his monstrous paw.
The wind roared.
My mother smiled for some reason. Perhaps at the possibility of gentleness from a monster. I went back to watching the scene outside half expecting Kong to offer an outstretched arm to lift me out of the house, and into adventure.
I lived in a tiny little house, in a tiny little half-suburb, in Greater Western Sydney called Fairfield Heights. The Winter school holidays had just begun. It was July in the year 1987. I don’t remember the day, because I was young. I was only seven years of age.
I was an excitable kid. Always after adventure.
You might describe me as being in a constant state of stupefaction and awe at just about everything. At that moment it was the storm outside, and the bobbing trees, and the errant leaves, caught up in the wind spelling out secret messages meant only for me.
At other times I was at awe of soccer in the backyard; the way truck’s horns could be so loud; the value of money; cats (in general); and the apparently incalculable knowledge of my now dead father - according to my just now alive mother.
But nothing compares to the dizzying awe I experience a little while later, when IT happened.
It wasn’t like the movies when they came.
It wasn’t ordered or sensible.
The televisions stopped. The radioes and cars and planes stopped too. It seemed that if it was electrical, it shorted out. Knowing what I know now, their ability to dominate our technology seems eminently possible; obvious; fated. But then, I had to experience their power by seeing it for myself.
And I would come to know it keenly.
Mum never got to see the end of King Kong that afternoon. She never got to see any other movie at all (or anything else) for the rest of her whole life. This won’t make sense yet, but she actually had the opportunity to see it, but then she hadn’t, so I don’t think it counts.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
We spent that afternoon, my brother, sister, mother and I, thinking what we had on our hands was a local blackout. We twiddled with switches, and poked and prodded the electronics. We banged the side of the television, and kicked the back of the fridge. We checked the fuses and twisted the light bulbs. Nothing at all seemed to work. There was nothing more to be done about it. Mum stuck what she could of the early, half-made, pasta dinner into the fridge and grabbed the boardgames. We settled on Hungry Hungry Hippo as a group, and began to play as mum prepared for the night to come by collecting together all the candles and lighters she could get her hands on.
I’d say it was around an hour later, and deep into Twister, when Mr Tsolous came by with his portable radio, which was - unlike almost anything in our house - still powering on. It was at about that time (or a few minutes later) that we began to at least consider that this was more than a simple blackout.
“The SBS radio…not work.” Mr Tsolous exclaimed as he tripped into the house, leaving behind him at the door a sopping umbrella and wet shoes. Mr Tsolous’s wife had passed away too, just like dad. She had died last year, and dad the year before. Mr Tsolous had become a frequent visitor to our home. He had a knack for making me feel welcome. There was something constant about him.
Little did I know how wrong I was about constancy.
My mother herself was half Greek and she would make Mr Tsolous Greek-ish food on weekends and invite him to family dinner every so often. When he was finally inside, and a little drier (post towel-down), I could see that there was something amiss. He seemed altogether put out by something. Really not himself.
“Let me see,” my mother said, taking the old red hand-held radio gently from him, scanning through the channels. He looked at her, wide-eyed.
At least, she thought, it was working. Nothing else seemed to be.
“I think maybe the dial is broken Nick. It’s just static. And anyway, the SBS transmits from Artarmon. Unless they are also having a blackout I think we’re ok.”
“Not just SBS…other ones too,” he struggled back reaching the limits of his English.
“Let’s test ours,” I said precociously, running to the kitchen to grab our portable radio from the top drawer. Even though I didn’t know it then, it was fortunate that that particular radio had had the batteries removed before being stored in the drawer, or what happened next, would not have happened.
My mother grabbed two fresh D batteries and jammed them into the battery slot. She flicked the switch and it turned on.
Static.
She toggled through every possible channel and got the same result she’d gotten with Mr Tsolous’s radio. Absolutely nothing. Not one singular channel. Nothing in the AM. Even nothing-er in the FM.
This radio had been working less than a fortnight ago. There was nothing wrong with it. Why wasn't it working, my mother thought.
If thoughts can be infinite, then one thought, no matter how consequential, is a trifle in the scheme of things. Actually a trifle is a pretty delicious dessert, and in my opinion a damn sight more pleasurable than a single thought could ever be; except of course the thought of tucking into a delicious trifle. Where was I? Oh yes. A single thought is actually closer to no thought at all, when stacked up side by side with all of the other things it’s not. But it only took one thought to completely change my life. And not just mine.
At that moment my mother’s mind split neatly into two parcels, though they were not equal in size. I couldn’t have known what was happening to her mind at that time, any more than I could have understood the Supra-universal Hyper-mathematics required to prove the existence of mind splitting on the molecular level. The one part of her mind that occupied the larger slice of her brain, was concerned only with maintaining the fundaments of reality required, such that she could continue to smile and make sandwiches and generally function without losing her mind and going very much, if not entirely looney. The other bit of her mind, had come to a fairly hasty conclusion about the general shit-fight reality had decided to pick with her, and how she might manage this fight with three kids, no husband (for what that’s worth) and a half finished dinner.
After saying a prompt fare-thee-well to Mr Tsolous and his pesky reality altering radio, mum pulled out some ham and cheese from the fridge, stuffed the two hastily between some slices of white bread, and ended up, quite by accident with three fairly ordinary sandwiches. She threw each of the sandwiches onto a small plate, poured each of us a glass of full-sugar cola (usually reserved for visitors) and watched as we considered our next moves.
June was ecstatic about this turn of events. What a day, she thought. First, all the lights had gone out, then Mr Tsolous had waved around a radio, and now cola for dinner! She drank the whole glass of cola before taking a single bite. Both the cola and sandwich were gone in around 50 seconds.
Ari kept looking up at mum, hesitant as he always was, when things weren’t just so. What a horrible day he thought. First the TV had gone blank, then mum had made Mr Tsolous leave, and now his favourite dish, pasta, which had been abandoned due to the power outage, had been replaced with a stinking sandwich. Ari eventually began to dine, despite his misgivings, measuring each gulp of cola in such a way, so that he had just enough cola to wash down the last bite of the bland meal. That took him around 98 seconds.
I too looked up at my mother from the comfortable seat between my two siblings. Her smile seemed unsure of itself, and twitched like a room full of nervy interview candidates waiting to be called in next. She saw me looking at her, and I saw her looking, so looked right-on back. It was with an unspoken understanding, a little nod, a crinkling of the crow’s feet, that we both acknowledged that something didn’t quite add up. It was my first real life remainder. The first time life hadn’t divided perfectly into wholes as it had up until then. I was left with this nasty little irreconcilable tangle of annoying bits that I couldn’t fit neatly into my soul and a real regret that we didn’t have SureEnough Burglar Alarm installed.
“Not eating Paul?” She asked with a great deal more patience than I was used to, especially when it came to meal time.
“I’m saving it,” I replied.
“For what honey?” She asked carefully.
If it’s true (and I can assure you that it is) that the Universe is infinite in both dimension and substance and anti-substance with a good deal of nothing thrown in, then it is no great stretch of the imagination to consider that every thought, worthless though they are, has already been thought (thinked and thunk) by someone or something, somewhere. This rather well known theory, first penned on Taurus IV in the Crab Nebula by the galactically infamous grease-lump ParaPara~$113, was actually not completely accurate. All thoughts hadn’t been thought, thinked or thunk, when the grease-lump of Taurus IV had written his thesis. There were still a couple of thoughts yet to be thunk. In fact, it was purely a coincidence that the last thought, left to be thought, thinked or thunk was thought, thinked and thunk right there on Earth in the year 1987, by a little boy named Paul, sitting between his siblings, not eating a sandwich.
“I’m saving it,” I said, referring to the sandwich.
“I’m saving this delicious ham and cheese sandwich and Cola because time just folded in on itself with tremendous purpose and my stomach hurts, and the collective noun for ducks - amongst other options - is a raft. Paul Mercurio.”
And with that, the killing began.
Poor Tony, in the boxy sedan, copped it first. And then, by some incalculable probabilistic quirk, Paul Mercurio was next.