Category: Smoke (page 6 of 6)

A small patio shelters one half of the small garden from the rain and sun, the white posts of its supports ringed by vines of an almost glowing green. I remember the smooth concrete floor and the warm blue walls from my first encounter with the house, on that spacey day when I would have signed the lease on a dump. I was that happy. Spacelight is important. In the small shed at the back of the garden, I reach down and find what I’ve been seeking – the large olive oil tin, slightly dusty but otherwise free of rust. From my toolkit I take steel-cutting scissors and gouge off the top of the tin, cleaning it and then filling it with composted earth from the old worm farm. The olive oil tin’s about two thirds filled with good stuff, and I plant the Vietnamese mint deep in that solid goodness, watering the transplanted herb with water from the house’s secured rooftop collector. I wander around pulling curtains back, opening Windows to the soft rain opera of the morning.

‘Aramis is still in the dark’. ‘Aramis is in the planning stages of streetlight-facilitation’, they say in the planning podcasts. It manufactures its own leaves. Beneath the dike, under the glow of the eave-lights, I reach Blvd. 2, Apartment 109/A. We should call it something, you’d said over the crystal clear line. How about, I don’t know, Solaris? I preferred Midnight. We will see. The key turns loud in the lock and I almost stumble as the pink door swings easily back. The hall, empty. I pick up a number of letters that have fallen through the slit in the door and place them next to the small pile of furniture and bedding advertising holos. I’d left them there on my previous visit, just after signing the lease, returning to survey this newly-our-domain, our six month project. To your residency. The loungeroom remarkably similar in its dimensions to our previous abode, with the wide coloured Windows by the street, the back half of the room evaporating towards a dining space and kitchen, all the spaces for dishes dim, hiding their bright colours in the curfew light. I leave the Vietnamese mint on the kitchen bench and step out into space.

On the platform at Aramis Underground I’m hit by a blast of hot air and steam as an intercity maglev lumbers out, bound for Avalon and the western Metropoles. I notice more platform hawkers here than on my first visit, the day I signed the lease. Airport interconnections, the tourist drill, okay. The raised concourse roof harbours passengers, mostly refugees from smoking rain and toxic headlines. Down in the neat squares of the shopping centre I find solace in a momentary cup of miso, and then a stand containing newspapers in Chinese and English. By the smoking compartment, an amber light and an animated cigarette. My PCB goes off and I’m just reaching to answer when it stops, the missed call from a private number, no message, no story. When my connecting street metro arrives, I’m handing over dollars to a small woman selling Vietnamese mint, asking her not to cut off the roots.

I closed the door on our empty house for the last time, leaving the detritus of rental space – the video cards and home-delivery pizza menus, the old school telephone directories in yellow and white, sensor mood lights and triple flush, raked Japanese mini-garden and opaque pond, twin bins and water-efficient compost – for its new occupants, whoever won it in the moball. I’m shrugging off old paths, I said to myself, navigating the small maze of backstreets, diving down the Old Fitzroy Underground entrance, hardwired into the intersection of the street like a snooker-table pocket. I’m tumbling down the net, top right hand corner pocket, the treadmill submerging me beneath the trams and the people traffic. My mood re-melds once I’m down below, in the warm glare of the two intersecting underground lines. A shuttle’s coming & I metro west to Aramis, mesmerised by the retro cartoons of the advertising hoardings, the shuddering clunk of the brakes as we enter each half-moon station’s curve, the seats already packed, always packed. It’s always midnight down here. Faces like blank screens.

Rain falls like a scene change and I’m waking up in an empty field, sashaying ever so slightly on my airbed, scaring dust motes with my whoosh. Smelling smoke, controlling the intake of blue dust through my nostrils, knowing that I have to get up and fast, before the rain stops. It’s dawn. My handbag and portfolio over by Windows in a world of their own, backed by street noise and leaves. I’m rolling up the mattress, feeling for keys in my pocket, all the while listening to that rain, and the occasional sound. There – a bird loop perhaps, a canary caged at a coalface and forced to sing. Rain soft and thudding, like rubber mallets on streetscapes empty of traffic. Moon-drenched and amber rain. Smoky truck-stop rain. Off-screen, a TV bleating football scores into the dim and rain-silenced interior of a saloon. Television rain.