A MURDER

by

Paul F Walsh

When Susan and I arrive at Planet Fitness, a murder is not premeditated. We are too busy meditating on number plates in the car park. We are parked between BBC and CNN. Clearly our arrival is newsworthy on this foggy fitness morning.

Susan enters the Quonset building, her quest for fitness uppermost in her mind, never dreaming that she might never see me again.

My daily fitness walk begins and ends with Susan; till death us do part.

A pair of common grass parrots, hopping like escaped budgies, seek to punctuate my starting-block stillness. Their fear is tempered by curiosity. I am an unparsed sentence to them, and perhaps to myself.

I commence my pacing across from the harness track, rapidly disappearing into an opaqueness of being only matched by the weather. No Go-Karts-Go can make me go any faster.

My Rockports crunch on gravel as though chatting to old friends. A whale breeches from the fog between Supa Putt Golf and a jagged reef of abandoned fitness machines. They sit like rusted-on retirees waiting in a doctor’s surgery for renewed relevance.

I walk on.

I walk like a new man in an old world.

My mind is a blank as I enter the shroud of Womboin Road. A red, blinking fogbound 40 invites me to slow down for Lambton High; an aureoled beacon lighting the way, but a man of fitness does not slow down. I divert into Wyong Road where a matted chinchilla hisses Good Morning.

I exit Norah Road at the Lambton Fire Station. KEEP LOOKING WHEN COOKIN  G. The inexplicable spaces between the N and the G match my vacuous mood. What would the grass parrots think of this fiery lack of spatial literacy?

I cross Young Road into Durham Road, and the fog seems to thicken as wispy entrails of my past beckon like serpents.

Just before I reach the intersection of Durham Road and Wallarah Road, I spy a floral ladder climbing a tree. I smile, an inward smile of solidarity with a young imaginative child growing up in my old street. Lord Durham too might smile in irony if he knew how res publica we Lambtonians grew under his imperial nomenclature.

And then a black dog barks.

And I know I’m being followed.

The eyes in the back of my head see Rubber Soul under his arm. What does it mean? I don’t know, but I fear his approach, just as the grass parrots feared my stillness. I fear that Rubber Soul is a weapon.

I increase my pace, but so does he.

The butcher shop is cactus now. And so is the barber shop, but I see my dogged pursuer pause to say hello to the barber as though nothing has changed. No page has been turned. The barber is chewing PK gum beneath his Brylcreemed hair, and he is trying to sell my fogbound shadow a fishing line. Maybe my shadow will catch me with a rod and a reel.

Am I but a fish, and he a fisher of men?

I want to run to the red phone booth to be terrified by Button A and Button B instead of my current predicament, but the phone booth is no longer there outside the shop that is no longer there to serve the community that is no longer there.

I rush across Orlando and Illalung Roads and past the Multicultural Neighbourhood Centre, and I do not stop rushing until I reach the crest of the Durham Road hill.

I pause outside of what was once our corner shop. I look back to see that the neighborhood centre has emerged from the fog to be the East Lambton Progress Hall where unholy holy Mass used to be said. My shadow is crossing himself as he joins the silent congregation on hard wooden forms christened by the previous night’s wedding keg.

I cross to the other side of Durham Road.

The new owner of our old home invites me in for a guided tour. He is a firefighter whom I once taught. I am stunned by the architectural improvements, but mum’s old concrete laundry tubs are still there like comforting still points in a turning world.

I exit via our original squeaky garden gate.

He is staring at me from outside of our corner shop surrounded by all of the dead dogs of the district. An Alsatian is eating broken biscuits from his hand.

My biscuit-eating shadow heads across the road towards me.

Why does he grin with such rubber familiarity?

Is his grin risus sardonicus or just plain sardonic?

Evil is live lived backwards.

I break into a fearful gallop like the bolting milk horse that once shattered every bottle in the delivery cart at this very intersection.

Not even the past joys of backyard cricket in Fitzroy Road can tempt me away from the rise and fall of Durham Road and passing memories of off-key opera being warbled from a tiny back landing as though it were a sprawling stage.

I sprint downhill past the ghost of an old friend who is staring into the lane where the bloody jaws of sharks grin, and I do not stop running till I spy a familiar couple at the bottom of the Durham Road hill.

My pursuer is momentarily lost in the fog.

I learn from the couple that the giant camphor laurel in their backyard was planted in 1913. I am always humbled by living entities that were here before me and will be here when I’m gone. Both the tree and the couple were fond fixtures in my youth. And then I see him, as bold as brass, patting their old Labrador who has been dead for over forty years.

I have never been so terrified in my life.

For a moment, I consider confronting my stalker, asking him what he wants, but then I see Rubber Soul still clutched under his arm, and I bid a desperate farewell to the familiar couple, and I run like the wind across Karoola Road before dashing across Durham Road once more.

I veer right after Lambton Pool and sprint beside the drain towards the distant rotunda in Lambton Park. An empty fitness station mocks my progress from afar. Elderly fig trees chatter to each other like distant gossips over a backyard fence. Blue birds mysteriously circle my passage past a row of dog-eared paperbarks, and the fog suddenly lifts.

I can see it all now.

He is no longer pursuing me.

He is ahead of me.

As I approach the rotunda at a more sedate pace, a huge black dog reacts fearfully to the presence of a shaved border collie. There are dogs on leads everywhere, but whose lead am I on?

I glance along the arcade of crepe myrtles towards the memorial gates, and my pursuer is sitting there writing poetry. I ignore him, but I cannot ignore the fact that he sits near the hole in which Susan and I are buried.

I walk between the children’s playground and the blue tennis courts, and I eventually sit on a wooden bench between the old Lambton Library and its miniature Little Library.

I feel the presence of books to be comforting and calming.

I once saved a bronze tawny frogmouth from rock-throwing schoolboys in this literary vicinity.

The Mechanics Institute peeps through the trees as though trying to admire the rotunda.

And, as I sit, calming myself, disentangling every knot of this morning’s fearful pursuit, I find a stone with a painted green-and-blue face.

I have walked and run from Young Road to Elder Street.

I am staring at the back of the stone when the crows arrive.

The stone bears the number 6754 with instructions. Apparently, I can hide it again, or keep it.

Stone the crows, those school boys might have cried. And I am crying now as I clutch this first stone with the crows staring accusingly at me.

A murder.

A murder of crows.

I feel the blow from a Rubber Soul clenched under my arm.

And I throw that stone as hard as I can.

The pursuit is over.

I have finally caught up.

And I have finally been caught.

 

Have I murdered my past self?

or:

has my past self murdered me?