He’d experienced a step down in his professional career. Having previously specialised in the design of renewable energy equipment for the car industry, in Australia, he found himself employed at Unitex installing home entertainment systems. At week’s end most of the staff descended on the Rickard Hotel, just three doors down from the office, and this was where Benton was introduced to the luscious liquor, as Milton put it, and where he first discovered a special kind of faux-confidence.
It had come to him one evening that no one wanted prolonged, thoughtful conversation; it was the smart and springy comments which endeared, the one-liners that could be tossed off like a text message or the half dozen words of Twitter. He could easily manage that and he learned to slip his two bob’s worth into the hotel’s witty repartee, recognising that his chronic lack of social ease went largely unnoticed. It was all quite funny, really.
And in time, Benton learned to invoke some of his aristocratic legacy. Calling upon the monologues of his forebears, he discovered that he could hold forth in front of anyone with all manner of preposterous statements – and people seemed to accept it. He remembered the first ludicrous thing he’d said to his Afghan flatmate the day they’d met: You understand, young fellow, this is a temporary measure. My inheritance will soon be forthcoming and when it does, I intend purchasing something much more agreeable, a property by the river perhaps, but certainly a long way from this unremarkable little borough. Arman’s attention had been magically arrested. You understand I’m not used to such ordinary arrangements. But in the meantime I suppose we should just make the most of it, eh?
DESPITE BENTON’S apparent lack of regard for their living quarters – or perhaps because of it – Arman warmed to him. Call me Ben, the man offered genially, unless you intend a formal dissertation. He represented so much of what Arman was not: urbane, eccentric and unwilling to accept the mediocrity that life often dished out. Benton was a gentleman and Arman assumed that his way of speaking came naturally; it was the English language at its purest. It intrigued him and challenged his own grammar and, altogether, Benton appeared to be just the sort of person with whom he might share a dwelling – though he did not tell his housemate that ben meant ‘co-wife’ in Pashto.
But for all of that, the Englishman’s manners were a mystery: eating with both hands, passing items with his left, clearing the nose with the cloth in his right. And of course his fellow renter was an infidel – he had not yet found God. But Arman was learning tolerance in all things and there was no one he felt more inclined to tolerate than the blond, gangly, forty-something Englishman with the cultivated accent so refreshingly unlike his own.
With their bedrooms upstairs just a passageway apart, it was imperative that they learn to live harmoniously. Yet coming as they did from extreme cultural polarities, some kind of common ground was necessary – which turned out to be the kitchen downstairs. The room was by no means attractive and Arman declared it a cooking hole, to which the other man replied, ‘But the roses, my good fellow, what lovely roses!’ and directed Arman’s attention to the pattern on a well-worn teatowel that hung over a plastic-coated rail. Upon first arriving, both men had assessed with some gratitude, the included kitchen fittings: a fridge near the door, an old gas stove pushed into a brick recess, a wooden table and three chrome chairs standing on flecked vinyl flooring.
Additionally, there was a large, laminated sideboard backed against the opposing wall. It was atop this that Benton, in the first week of renting, installed a large flatscreen monitor and wired it to a closed-circuit camera that overlooked the main street. Nikos, their landlord, approved; it might add value to the property. He called in from time to time, to collect the rent and discuss the excavation that was soon to take place in the front room facing Frederick Street. Nick believed it had once been a butcher shop, but for the present, that room was completely unusable, its windows papered over and its floor no more than compacted earth. The middle-aged man from Mykonos explained to his tenants that he’d enthusiastically torn up the Baltic boards expecting to find the cellar but found it had been completely filled in with earth. Yet, if an ancient subterranean chamber had once existed, he declared, then he would dig the damn thing out again.
It was the unusable front room that had prompted Benton’s surveillance camera – there was no other way that he could observe people in the outside world. But now he could look on just as he’d always done: privately, discreetly and without alarming his subjects. From the comfort of a kitchen chair he could observe everyone endlessly and he knew it was only a matter of time before he would see something of genuine interest, something he desired yet dared not hope for.
SHAUN WALKED his bicycle home. A sharp stone had ruptured a tyre, precipitating an hour-long journey along the unmade road instead of a twenty-minute one. But it took the boy much longer. Every short while, something beyond the road’s shoulder would catch his eye and he felt obliged to investigate. First it was a case-moth cocoon suspended from a barbwire fence and the species needed to be identified. Next, he came across the faint tracks of a large monitor lizard, sometimes called a goanna. He followed those delicate markings from the dusty road into the dense bush, but it was all to no avail. The creature might be very close by but Shaun knew that monitors liked to cling to the far sides of tree-trunks and that as he moved, the lizard would also move, maintaining its position furthest from him.
Shaun sauntered on. With so much time on his hands it was an excellent opportunity to think, to exercise the affliction that had dogged him most of the past decade. He formed in his mind a detailed image of his Aunty Adele’s new home, the two-storey Victorian-style building with the large door that opened right onto the footpath. There was a bus stop next door, and a power pole that leaned slightly, holding aloft a thick black cable that was attached to the building’s stucco rendering. There were two windows on the second floor where he could identify scalloped and tasselled blinds raised slightly and a plaited cord hanging down. The wooden window frames, which were painted a slightly darker tone, were in need of a bit of work, and high above it all, four traditional finials, domed and decorative, stood starkly against the skyline.
How useful Google Earth could be! If Shaun could not yet visit, at least he could travel there in virtuality, courtesy of NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography. That technology had placed him right outside the front door and Shaun had scooted up and down the street, climbed all over the building, danced across the rooftop, checked all the nearby stores and cafés, and studied most of the geographical features. There was a park nearby and a small creek – and a bicycle-repair shop next to a recently converted power station. And standing outside his aunt’s front door he could determine the exact condition of its paintwork. All he could not do was ring the bell.
Could not ring the bell – what a marvellous prescription for living, a reminder that life is to be experienced as much as viewed. Humans were good at seeing, Shaun knew, better than other mammals that required movement to notice things. But seeing, for humans, was also tangled up with knowing: Oh I see, people would say, and so they did, but that was no reason not to experience things in equal measure. Get the balance right, his father had instructed.
The light was fading when he reached his own drive and pushed the bicycle down through the old Manna Gums. His father was already at home and Shaun took the bike to him. They removed the tyre together, working quickly before the treeline obscured the sun; that same flaming ball that, no doubt, was simultaneously mantling in peach-coloured light, the front of his aunty’s residence.
WHILE BENTON held vigil at the monitor, Arman cooked – even trialling such rare and foreign delights as beef sausages, potato mash, peas and pastry with tomato sauce. And when everything was cleared away, Arman would join his fellow renter in front of the closed-circuit screen. They both liked sitting there; and over a cup of tea, the main beverage of both their countries, they took turns commenting on the particularities of all who passed or stopped to await the bus.