WALTER
Ashley Sievwright
Clouds of Magellan | Melbourne
© 2012 Ashley Sievwright
First published 2012
Clouds of Magellan, Melbourne, Australia
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-9874037-0-4 (Print)
ISBN: 9781742982281 (ePub)
Digital distribution by Ebook Alchemy
Conversion by Winking Billy
WITH THANKS TO
Eleonora, Gordon and Amanda
CONTENTS
1. DON’T GET ON THE NEXT TRAIN
2. ON THE JOB AT EQUITY
3. THE ODDS OF DYING
4. KNIFE ATTACK ON CROWDED TRAIN
5. MICHAEL EVERAARDT’S LUCKY BREAK
6. BBQ IN WINTERGARDENS
7. WATCH OUT FOR EIGHT FORTY-FIVE
8. ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE
9. EIGHT FORTY-FIVE
10. MAGGIE KOVAK GOES ON THE RECORD
11. A POTATO IN THE SHAPE OF THE VIRGIN MARY
12. AT THE PINK FLAMINGO MOTOR-INN
13. WALTER AND MISSY CONTEMPLATE ANGELS
14. LAST VISIT TO DR FELDMAN
15. DON’T TRUST YOUR WIFE
16. AT THE ALBERT HOTEL
17. WALTER GETS ON THE NEXT TRAIN
1.
DON’T GET ON THE NEXT TRAIN
Walter felt a raindrop on his cheek. He put his hand out and looked up at the sky. In the east the sky was blue and the early morning sun was lazily low and heavy on the horizon, the colour of an early morning wee. But directly above was a dark cloud which was now (yes, another drop, and then another fell on his hand) raining on the suburb of Wintergardens. It rained upon the umbrellas of the early morning commuters who were on their way to the train station; upon the windscreens of the cars backing out of driveways and making their way to the on-ramp of the nearby freeway; upon the roofs of the houses which were bright orange in the wet sunlight; upon the grass and other foliage which was virulent green, sleek and wet, as if it was visibly, palpably photosynthesising before his eyes. The raindrops themselves were picked out mid-flight by the sun, like chipped diamonds—they looked as if they would hurt, but of course they didn’t. Everything looked shiny bright and new, as if the entire suburb was fresh out of the automatic car-wash.
Walter rolled his eyes and made a dismissive sound with his tongue. Sun-showers. This wasn’t weather, he thought, as he walked through the rain towards the train station, this was somewhere in between weather, unreal and undecided and totally, what was the word? Yes that was it— totally unconvincing.
It didn’t seem to him an odd opinion to have. He didn’t wonder how it was he remained unconvinced about something that actually existed, something real and tangible that he was walking through.
Of course he knew it was real. He could feel the sun on his face and the raindrops on the back of his hand. These were fact—hard meteorological fact. This was weather. It was happening. But these facts, he felt, still didn’t make it aesthetically convincing. He actually said the words in his head, aesthetically unconvincing.
Walter often had his own internal monologues going on. Not voices inside his head as such, not other people or entities talking to him or telling him to do things, nothing like that, nothing crazy. Just a running monologue of his own voice, his own thoughts, in his head—himself, inside, looking at things, considering, summing up, sorting, categorising, commenting, pigeon-holing, judging and critiquing the world around him. Walter was a pedant, a fiend for accuracy, for boiled-down pithiness, and it made him feel good to find the right words, the right way to express himself, even if it was only in his head. But everyone had that, didn’t they? It was called thinking wasn’t it? Everyone thinks, Walter thought to himself.
OK, so his internal monologues weren’t always only internal. Sometimes he would say something out loud, sure, talk to himself. Everyone did that too, didn’t they, on occasion? On the road, for example, in the car by himself, he would say things out loud, as if speaking to other drivers—criticise their driving, or point out their mistakes, or just rant at them, call them names. One time he lost his temper with a slow driver in front of him in the fast lane of the freeway and he came out with: do you have to drive like such a pussy? This so amused him at the time, the fact that he had described someone as a pussy—what was he, ten years old?—that he couldn’t help laughing at himself. He then said: pussy-driver over and over again, enjoying the sound of it, the silliness of it. He even did it in different accents, starting with a BBC announcer kind of voice, and ending up as Samuel L Jackson.
He wasn’t really a swearing kind of person, and as a result he came out with the strangest things, co-opting as his own a whole heap of slightly inappropriate (for him) catch-phrases or insults he had gleaned from television or books, magazines, film-clips shown on early morning weekend television, and all of them, without a doubt every single one of them, sounded foreign coming out of his middle-class, conventional mouth. This was the other side of the well-spoken pedant, the Walter who could call someone a pussy-driver.
Sometimes his internal voice might rehearse conversations he would have, if he could ever work up the courage, with his Supervisor (a young Indian man called Devadarshan or Dev for short—a ‘youth’ Walter called him, fifteen years his junior). Things he might say to his wife Maggie (but you didn’t, as a rule, say things to Maggie). Or he might practice what he was going to talk about at his next appointment with Dr Feldman (his psychiatrist— but again, no, he wasn’t crazy).
If anyone ever noticed him, ever saw him snigger to himself as he made a joke in his head, or make an odd facial expression as if coming to a conclusion, or if they heard him in his car, calling out strange adolescent insults at other drivers, then, yes, they might not be quite so sure that this was all normal and there was nothing-to-see-here. They might, as a matter of fact, suspect, just quietly, that Walter was a bit of a kook.
His full name was Walter Kovak. It was, perhaps, an old-fashioned first name for a man of only forty-two years of age, but his parents, Poles who had immigrated to Australia in the 1950s, had named him after his grandfather, whose name had actually been Waclaw, the Polish for Walter. He was thankful he hadn’t been lumbered with Waclaw. His parents had been quite old when he was born, a late and unplanned baby, and both had since passed away.
There were traces of his Polish ancestry in Walter’s face. He had a heavy jaw and a wide forehead. He had a strong rather big nose, well-shaped lips and big, watery eyes. His hair grew dark and thick and square across his forehead—he combed it to the back and generally parted it on the right side although it never stayed. His skin was quite pale and pasty, and if he did get sun he would usually turn pink, sometimes burn and peel without turning brown.
He was of medium height and regularly proportioned, thick-set without being overweight. He was hairless on his chest and arms, but as hairy as a goat around his privates and on his legs—well perhaps not as hairy as a goat, but almost, although this wasn’t perhaps as immediately obvious to the general observer. He had collapsed arches, so purchased running shoes specifically designed to support his feet and inner soles for his other shoes—as a result when he walked he walked correctly, on the outside edge of his feet, down onto the balls of his feet and off the toe. Aware of a propensity for lower back pain, at work he sat stolidly