nightshift

Driving through the streets of Fitzroy at night you become obsessed with streetlight and the sound of an imagined disturbance occurring in flat thirteen on the twenty fifth floor of the Brunswick St. commission flats. In daylight, there is little to see but a urine stain on a tram shelter seat. An old stiff with a grey beard named Jimmy calls to you unintelligibly from the other side of the street. You wish that you were somewhere else; perhaps wandering along a path beneath a mountain in the bush...

But no.

You are up against a brick wall. Forever waiting to be released from the pain that is synonymous with the stiff named Jimmy who sits the day out on Death Row while trams travel along gentrified Gertrude St. 

Jimmy isn’t a bad man, but he’d snip you for twenty dollars if he could. He sits in his tram shelter, one foot across a thigh, digging splinters of glass out of the soles of his bare feet. The memories emanating from the grey hair covering his scalp are all he has for company. Nobody bothers about old Jimmy, so he creates imaginary friends in order to deflect the pain circulating in his head.

Jimmy once drove a cab at night. One morning, when the encroaching daylight had washed another junkie’s brains into the gutter, he drove home and  had breakfast. While sitting at the kitchen table he saw what he believed was a worm wriggling in his buttered toast. He placed a finger in the marmalade jar and dabbed a touch of ginger in the direction of the worm’s mouth. It promptly slurped the marmalade off his finger, smiled, and in Jimmy’s mind, thanked   him for the secretion. The worm then crawled beneath his fingernail and entered his bloodstream through a crack in his skin. Jimmy quietly explained this to his mother; she blessed herself, kissed her son between the eyes, then made him a dish of pear and pineapple pieces hoping that something fruity would prepare her son for the nightshift.

After breakfast Jimmy read the Neos Cosmos. As the heat of the afternoon drew near he retired to his bedroom and studied an old high school history report. He dropped off to sleep riding the gratification obtained from reading a comment his teacher had made:

‘Jimmy is a very bright boy who does no work’.

As he dozed the worm that he believed had earlier entered his bloodstream fused with the memory of Mrs. Logan’s words until a further sentence was tacked onto the end of the history report:

‘Jimmy is a very bright boy who does no work. For punishment, he must clean up the streets’.

His mother woke him at 4.00 pm. She knocked on his bedroom door then marched into his room and checked him for dysentery. (Her husband had been killed fighting the fascists in the mountains of Northern Greece. He had been a Greek resistance fighter, who, when captured by the Italians, had been forced to sit unchecked in a cell for nine months until an Italian soldier had walked in one morning unannounced and asphyxiated the prisoner using Jimmy’s father’s own excrement. Since the knowledge of that foul act had reached Jimmy’s mother she had remained petrified by the presence of faecal matter. She sensed it everywhere: under the stairs, in the  refrigerator, hiding out surreptitiously under the model bridge Jimmy had constructed in the backyard of their home and which acted as a monument over the fish pond he had built in memory of his dead father). 

Jimmy was free of dysentery, but the worm that he believed had burrowed beneath his fingernail earlier that day had increased in size during the five hours he had been asleep. He now heard and felt Mrs. Logan’s command circulating in his arteries and forcing its message through veins, onto blood vessels; which then pumped her command into each muscle of Jimmy’s body until his arms, legs, head, toes and feet were ready to put this command to work and quote: 

‘...clean up the streets.’ 

Unquote.

Later, Jimmy sat at the kitchen table, bread crumbs clinging to the sleeve of his shirt, gazing at his features in a hand held mirror his menopausic mother had once used when plucking her eyebrows and waxing her bikini line. 

His mother entered the kitchen through a rear door with orange worry beads ensconced in her left hand and muttering ‘Hail Mary’ in unorthodox Greek; this was Jimmy's cue to hit the street. He placed the mirror on the kitchen table and dismissed the furrowed brow that now followed him through the flywire door - Jimmy unaware of its presence between his black kalimata eyes - and into Vere St. 

Outside, a local street urchin dangled the entrails of a ginger tom cat on a bamboo stick, saw Jimmy, twirled the mess several times, and released it. The entrails slapped on  the driver’s side windscreen of Jimmy’s Silver Top Holden Kingswood.

Jimmy could have murdered the child; indeed, should have murdered the child. This kid, along with all the other kids that played in Jimmy’s region, who refused to play anywhere else, was a constant reminder of his semiconscious desire to kill off ‘The Child’. If Jimmy wanted to achieve this ambition he would have to transcend himself and become a red eyed battalion of tungsten, human protein, and simple stainless steel, put together and integrated with various weaponry, some obvious, some not so, into a two tone, white hot, come as you are to the party killing machine.

The sun slithered across the roofs of houses and all its grace and splendour was lost in sawtooth alcoves and sheets of rusty corrugated iron. Jimmy held the ginger tom’s entrails in one hand while its pancreas remained lodged between the taxi’s wiper blade and windscreen. He hurled the entrails after the retreating child then lunged for the pancreas with the intention of removing it. Unluckily for Jim his intellectual faculty kicked in and he was quietly impressed by the proud pancreas’ emanating theoretical value. As the saying goes, and this is not one I would use in any other context I assure you, Jimmy was about to ‘Bust his Pooper’. 

The worm which that morning had slipped beneath Jimmy’s chipped fingernail and manoeuvred its way into his bloodstream permeated his mind. He now believed it had receded, recidivist worm that it was, into the compartment in his brain that contained traces of zinc, iron oxide, lead, sulphur and bauxite, and which had been secreted there by the monumental amount of illicitly made amphetamine Jimmy had injected in a previous attempt at killing off ‘The Child’. With worm and heavy metals in tow - and an undissolved preservative attached to a jelly crystal he had eaten as a child - Jimmy was ready to inflict harm upon the nearest pederast he could find.

The sun was completely hidden in alcoves and side streets as the nightshift began with ginger tom’s pancreas flapping insistently on the windscreen. A constant reminder to Jimmy of the fun filled days he had been forced to spend with his mother. All of which culminated in a desire to whip the blade of his paint scraper across the carotid artery of ‘The Child’. 

A voice cackled into life on the two way radio. It was Mary Kyrikilli, the depot manager’s wife. The job involved picking up an elderly couple in Surrey Hills wanting a lift to the over seventy five’s dance in Canterbury. What Jimmy heard was this:

“You have a function to fulfil at 666 Fitzroy St. St. Kilda. Be quick, for the scum is sliding off the street and receding into drains then catching the first train to outer Elsternwick. We applaud your meticulous preparations for performing the task of killing ‘The Child’. We respect your commitment to cleaning up the streets and replacing unredeemed low life with flesh powered by pink spark plugs. We recognise your brain’s ability to assimilate organic material, heavy metal, and static electricity. We admire the organism you have become Jimmy: your quilled fingers, tungsten breast plate, metal teeth, and plumber’s worm for a tongue. We implore you to unleash this flexible spike from your mouth and reach into the decadent minds of the scum who surf Fitzroy St. You are the future Jimmy... Do you read me ?”

Mary’s voice fractured into an orangutan’s outraged scream that pierced Jimmy’s skull, ramming the shears into the soft skin beside his forehead. His eyes crackled with green intensity. He pressed the cab’s accelerator to the floor, picked up the receiver, and responded to Mary’s call: 

“Clear as the night sky seen from the planet Venus”.

His cab rocketed past a sex shop in Smith St. just as its pot bellied, red moustached proprietor stepped out for a breather.

“That’s odd”. The proprietor lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.

“There’s a cab without its lights on”.

Excessive exposure to the Kuma Sutra, jet propelled semen, and pink pelvic interiors pierced by nuts and bolts, wooden pegs, and surgical steel curtain rings eventually overwhelm the most sophisticated thinkers. The proprietor stepped back inside, but not before carelessly flicking his half finished cigarette into the sky - and there it remained, frozen. The city skyline wheezed while in St. Kilda, Fitzroy St. seethed with discontinuity and shallow breathing as Jimmy’s murderous thoughts sharpened the shears.

Number six hundred and sixty six Fitzroy St. was a Malaysian Hawker’s joint. The restauranteur and a Labrador-Deerhound cross he kept in a kennel in the kitchen both studied Jimmy with similar expressions when he walked into the restaurant and proclaimed he was on a mission from Mary. The restauranteur shrugged: 

“Sorry. Not on the menu here”.

Then resumed tossing squealing noodles, broccoli, and tofu in a wok. In his left ear Jimmy heard the depot manager’s wife and temporary radio operator Mary Kyrikilli. She sang a song he remembered singing in primary school. The words were unfamiliar: a jumble of disconnected nouns, verbs and present tenses, but Jimmy recognised the tune. His mother had hummed the same tune while sitting in a chair as she tried to conceal from her infant son the homesickness and accompanying despair she felt for the mountains of Northern Greece. 

Jimmy’s vision of the Labrador-Deerhound’s curling upper lip, revealing pink gristle and canines capable of inflicting a serious incision, was blurred by melancholic feelings rising through his gullet and intersecting with Mary Kyrikilli’s pursed lips whispering in his ear. The restauranteur slipped his hand beneath the dog’s frothing muzzle, grabbed its leather collar, and demanded Jimmy exit the premises post haste. Instead of ramming the shears as he had planned, Jimmy turned and stepped onto Fitzroy St. 

Next door, a fight erupted in the bar of the Prince of Wales Hotel, and spilled out over cascading chairs and tables onto the footpath. 

Jimmy became involved in the fracas. 

The bouncer, a bald headed gorilla, stomped up and down on Jimmy’s head until a member of the Scottish clan celebrating St. Andrew’s Day in the bar intervened, and hit the bouncer with a Bowlo combination that cracked the bouncer’s rib and broke his nose. 

The other Jocks drinking portergaffs at the bar broke into a chant for Glasgow singing:

“Here we go... Here we go... Here we go...”.

But their striker’s score on the bouncer was soon equalised by a door bitch well versed in Zen Do Kai, sadism, and the cultivation of azaleas. 

In retaliation, she KO’d Jimmy with a Liverpool Kiss. 

Jimmy sat cross legged amid the chaos, losing blood from his right ear, and pleading for help to find his glasses. He was unable to do so, and feeling rather discontent, until one of the Scottish celebrants finally bought him a beer.

“There you are my good man...”, said Jock to the unremitting Jimmy.

“Drink up, for you are about to meet your maker”.

He walked down Fitzroy St. dressed in his stove pipe suit. When he reached The Esplanade the sound of waves breaking on St. Kilda beach accumulated in his mind. He sat down on the dirty sand, stared across Port Phillip Bay, and saw a silhouette of the You Yang Range in the night sky. He pulled his beanie over his eyes and saw an image in his mind of a man not unlike himself. That man wore a tungsten breast plate that contained a moving image of the Serengeti Plain. Jimmy now believed that he was wearing a tungsten breastplate that contained a moving image of the Serengeti Plain. Then, in spite of the worm beneath his fingernail, and the cat entrails on the windscreen, Jimmy murdered ‘The Child’.

He had wanted to go to the milkbar and buy another ice cream, but his mother had disallowed it, so he had placed a chair beside the window in his bedroom, stood on the chair, and beat his little fists upon the pane of glass until it smashed. He had seen the ice cream stick in his mind, sailing through the sewer beneath the suburb he had grown up in, while hiding under the bed and staring at his mother’s bare legs as she tried to coax him into the open. But Jimmy had refused to come out from under the bed under any circumstance for he knew this meant a beating, so his mother had sent the straw broom under the bed in an attempt to dislodge him. He felt the scratch and tickle, the rip and sickle like feature of sharp straw upon his bare thigh. He squeezed further into a hole between the bed and the wall and slashed his elbow open on a protruding bed spring. He cried and his mother screamed, while the real culprit leant against the wall. The straw broom, diffident, composed,  quietly calculating the amount of blood the boy’s wound had sprayed upon its handle.

On the night of his breakdown Jimmy struck fourteen people on the head with an engineer’s hammer. When his cab sideswiped a telephone pole in Richmond he ripped a piece of metal from the cab’s rear door and tried to dig that worm out of his ear. A gardener found him in the Botanic Gardens at 8.30 am with the metal shard protruding from the wound in his head. The worm was nowhere to be seen, but Jimmy had mumbled something about a bloated maggot wriggling down Batman Ave. toward Flinders St. According to Jimmy, his extraterrestrial partner had boarded a train, gained six kilograms on the trip by eating leftover packets of potato chips, then alighted in Ringwood.

Jimmy was sentenced to three and a half years in jail, during which he was raped by one inmate, beaten by two, and poleaxed by a screw. Upon his release into the community he lived with a fervour only countered by the ecstasy derived from watching an Old English Sheepdog urinate against a pole. Yet Jimmy did not complain, or if he did, then it was a complaint directed inward - to that black hole he has remained in for the past twenty years.

Jimmy sucks hard on a cigarette butt. A tram stops alongside his shelter in Gertrude St. He is preoccupied with swatting flies in and around his beard, but the combined stare of the tram cuts him to the quick and he is invigorated. 

“Come ‘ere...”, Jimmy says.

He waves an alighting passenger in his direction, hoping to score a fag or some coins for a bottle of turps, but the elderly woman blows disgust at him then disappears into a Voluntary Helpers shop to do her bit for charity. Jimmy’s moment of clarity dissipates in his air of lost connections. 

I watch Jimmy from across the street, sitting in his tram shelter, one foot across a thigh. 

I am aware of a certain similarity that exists between us. 

Turpentine is not my poison, but living is.

His mother is asleep in the bedroom of her commission flat. She dreams of water sliding over rocks that cascades into a silent pool. Alongside one another Jimmy and his mother sit waiting for the Achilles Laura to sail back home to Greece. Outside, she can hear Jimmy’s voice, or another voice belonging to one of the hundreds of stiffs on Death Row, sitting in tram shelters on cold nights, sleeping beneath the All Ordinaries Index printed on daily newspapers, or simply fighting off the demon  that  is  Mary Kyrikilli emanating from a microchip Jimmy believes has been implanted in his cerebellum.

From the twenty fifth floor of the Brunswick St. commission flats there is only the night sky. The stars try and force the clouds apart but it is the clouds that contain the pain scintillating in Jimmy’s mother’s mind. She lies on her back in the dark, listening to an alarm clock, along with her son, sitting in a tram shelter in Gertrude St. He shouts obscenities that are directed at nobody in particular, yet she feels are reserved for her. She cannot go out and embrace him or invite him in for moussaka; the lights are on in Jimmy’s head but nobody’s home. He screams:

“Come ‘ere gamissou.... La, la,  la...”. 

His mother takes ear plugs from the draw beside her bed and inserts these into her ears. 

All is quiet at 3.53 am. 

This is the son she was unable to love who has returned to torment her. 

When the early birds rise the squeak they make is an expression of ornithological glee at the penetration of a starling’s beak into the green heart of a cicada. Jimmy’s mother wakes, hurries to the kitchen, and prepares a Turkish coffee.