Cydonia - Five

Five
A week crawls past with nothing but heat and cards. Tabitha’s skin grows darker making her eyes seem brighter. Leon swims lengths underwater, his body a shimmering blue haze. My brother and Pete sleep more and do less. Rob comes and goes, working here and there on farms and broken buildings. I fester in the shade, reading books and smoking cigarettes. My breathing gets worse, tighter, my inhaler seems less helpful than it used to. I wander the town. I see the same film in the cinema about the aliens and the eclipse, this time alone. There won’t be a new film for another two weeks; we should be gone by then, cruising towards the ocean with the windows down.

Roger eventually gets back to us and offers us a school to clean, my brother, Pete, Rob and me. It’s good news, a bit of money and something to do. It’ll take us at least five days he tells us, that’s if we do a good job and he knows we will. I’m not sure where his confidence in our cleaning ability comes from. We relax until we start, now savouring our time doing nothing, knowing that it’s all about to end.

The day before we begin we visit the garage. Our broken white tin remains, lying in a corner with other old machines. Steve offers us beer and we sit around in the workshop on overturned crates and unopened boxes. Our big end is on its way he tells us, lighting a cigarette and offering them around, I accept his smoke and fire, pretending to be like him. It’ll be here in a week, bit longer, he says as one of the scruffy dogs walks slowly over to look at us. He sits between my brother and me, I scratch his head and he closes his eyes. His skin is warm and dry, his hair brittle and tangled. Another mechanic joins us for a beer, Terry, a short man with a bald head and a bad tattoo on his arm of a melting eagle. We drink and we smoke with Terry and Steve and the scruffy dog. We talk about football and women and cars and girls. Terry tells jokes that he can’t remember, his jokes aren’t funny but the way he tells them makes us laugh. I’m not sure why we’re sitting here, in the mechanic’s workshop of an outback town, drinking and smoking and laughing with strangers and a scruffy dog. But it’s a beautiful thing.

The job is not fun, it is not a good time. But in a sense it is therapy. The foreign legion that cleaned the school with the dead thing has been disbanded, instead only we remain, my brother, Pete, Rob and me. It’s just us in the school. And in the school we are alone, sent to our own corners to clean. We have different weapons; my brother equipped like a Ghostbuster with a high pressure water hose and backpack, Pete with a rumbling floor buffer, Rob more basic with mops and cloths and liquids and me with a steam carpet cleaner and citrus chewing gum removal agent. We stay in our own areas all day, only meeting up in the forecourt for lunch.

For the most part I clean slowly. My day starts with moving all the furniture from one side of the room to the other, to clear the carpet. The small desks and chairs are light and free from graffiti, now and then my fingers touch an old piece of chewing gum, stuck secretly to the bottom of a desk. It doesn’t bother or disgust me, it reminds me of myself.

When the floor is clear I put on my personal stereo and start up the steam cleaner. It works like a Hoover, I slowly steam straight lines across the carpet, going over the same line a few times, until eventually reaching the half way point of the floor. My music must be turned up very loud, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to hear anything over the sound of the steamer.

Whenever I come across a piece of gum stuck in the carpet I turn off the steamer and soak the area with my citrus chewing gum removal agent. It’s a pleasant part of the job as the agent fills the room with orange and lemon. Once applied it must be left to soak for at least five minutes. This gives me a chance to smoke a cigarette outside or wander around the classroom looking at all the bits and bobs; the books, artwork, toys and magazines. There’s something nice about being in an empty school. Often I leave the agent to soak for much longer than five minutes, ten, even twenty. I walk slowly about the empty school, looking in classrooms and staffrooms, canteens and cupboards. It feels like I am the last surviving member of a great apocalypse.

When the agent has settled I attack the now moist gum with a sharp knife, prising it away from the fibres of the thin carpet. Sometimes they put up a fight, leaving straggling white guts streaming away from the carpet like pizza cheese, but mostly they lift freely, leaving only a dull dark mark where they lay. When the gum is gone and the carpet is dry I move all the furniture to the clean side of the room and start on the other half.

Lunch times are nice. We sit together in the sun or the shade and eat our sandwiches in peaceful contentment. We don’t talk much and if we do it’s usually about the job. It’s a good job. No hassles, no people to deal with, no boss breathing down your neck, as many smoke breaks as you like, it might be the best job I’ll ever have.

It’s the last day, the school almost clean, ready for the children to dirty it again. I only have one room to steam, easy. I clear one side and notice at least three white pancakes of gum. I douse them with agent and go for a walk.

As ever the sun beats down with relentless anger but the school was designed well, shade is never far. As I pass through the forecourt I notice Pete in a classroom, not working but skiving. He’s plugged in a TV and sits on top of one of the little desks watching the screen, his legs swinging in unison. I move closer until I can see what he’s watching; the kids show with the dancing and the singing and the pretty Asian girl. He picks his nose as he watches, plunging his finger deep into the blackness, turning it slowly, methodically, pleasurably. When he removes the sticky heap he examines it closely on the tip of his finger, holding it up to the light. He goes back to the dancing Asian girl and begins to roll it between thumb and forefinger. His eyes falter, his rhythmical movement seemingly drifting him towards a meditative stupor. As his eyes close they immediately snap open, jolted back to the waking world, his brain telling his fat body to get back to work. He tries to flick the little marble between his fingers into the centre of the room but it’s too fixed to let go. He tries again and again, losing it and finding it, flicking it and failing. Eventually he gives up and rubs it on a child’s jotter, protected neatly by a wallpaper cover. I remember wallpaper jotter covers and the memory is distant and soothing. I liked being able to tell what kind of wallpaper was in a classmate’s house by looking at the jotter. It was like secret information, peering where you shouldn’t, second sight to a place you’d never been. It annoyed me to see Pete tarnish someone’s jotter with his waste. We’re supposed to be cleaning.

I pass through a classroom and come upon a box filled with trashy celebrity gossip magazines. I sit down and leaf through them. The pages are filled with celebrities of all ages in compromising situations; upskirts, bikini malfunctions, unexpected tits on red carpets, sweaty armpits, acne, back fat. I find a series of photographs of a teenage actress on the beach in a bikini that doesn’t fit. I think about the sticky gum, its grip slowly relaxing under the power of citrus.

I walk to the toilets, the magazine concealed under my t-shirt, sticking against my back, my sweat. The toilet is cool and dark, unused for weeks and smelling clean. I piss at the bank of little urinals, bending down slightly, feeling like a giant. I go into one of the cubicles and lock the door. I take my shorts and boxers down and sit on the cooling ring of the toilet seat, slipping a little, arse sweat ice. I think about taking a shit but I know why I’m here. I don’t think about taking shits, I take shits. I think about other things, unseemly things inappropriate in the children’s toilet of an outback school. But look at the celebrity, frolicking around on the beach in her bikini that doesn’t fit. Look at her. Look at her. Look at her.

I’m about to finish my last room when Rob appears. Roger wants us to do something else, up at the gorge, me and you, cause we’re nearly finished. I ask Rob what he wants us to do. Clear out an office, he says, dump it all in a skip, won’t take us long. Okay, five minutes.

It’s a pleasant drive. Rob takes it nice and easy, we smoke cigarettes, our arms hanging out the window, the radio playing quietly. He stops for petrol and I buy an iced coffee and a bar of chocolate. We pass through town, past the cinema, the Court, the garage, Domino’s nightclub and the bar we sang Faith. We’ll leave here soon. And we’ll never come back.

It’s an easy job. The office is small and there isn’t much there to lift. The only heavy things are a filing cabinet and a desk. We lug them together, coordinating well as a team, listening to each other’s movements and demands. It all gets chucked into a half filled yellow skip, it’s rusting sides molten to the touch. We’re done in less than an hour.

We head to the visitor centre café for a Coke and a cigarette. At the back of the café a large balcony area looks out over the gorge. We lean there in the sun, looking out and down across the landscape, drinking our Coke and smoking our cigarettes. I close my eyes under the heat, I rub my hand slowly over my head, it’s warm like the scruffy dog’s in the workshop. We don’t mind the heat, though, not right now. The fire is melting our ice and burning our skin. But our work is finished and our drinks are still cold.

Rob tells me that Roger offered him a full time job, cleaning schools and organizing the workforce. That’s great, I tell him. He nods but isn’t sure. He doesn’t know if he can take it. He tells me there are still places he wants to see. I follow his gaze out and over the gorge, into the shimmering red and blue, as the fire melts the last of our ice.