(diaryland) November 01, 2009 - 9:19 p.m.

This is the first chapter of my November Novel. I usually read over my novel several times in the month and change vast bits of it because three weeks after I've written something I find out that it doesn't actually make any sense. So, with that in mind, here is Chapter The First, hot off the keyboard.

Balwyn Fountain

Chapter The First

At this point in my life, I was a ridiculously affluent truck driver. This wasn�t on the cards last year. I was pretty much the complete opposite last year. I was a uni student doing a fairly useless degree and definitely not a truck driver.

At the moment, I was probably the richest and shortest truck driver in Victoria, if not Australia. I couldn�t confirm that I was the shortest truck driver in the Southern Hemisphere, let alone the globe, because there are a lot of countries out there that produce small people in droves. Some of them would have to drive trucks. There was a really short guy who worked at the fish and chip shop in the town I grew up in. I think he was even shorter than me. He could have been the shortest fish and chip shop guy in the world, but we just can�t confirm these things. Jobs like taking orders at the fish and chip shop has no bottom in it in terms of stature, but there is for a job like truck driving. You really can�t be too short. It�s unfeasible. You have to get a truck especially modified, and people can�t see you when you�re trying to get your chiko roll at the truck stop everyone goes to just outside Wangaratta. I don�t know why they had to make the counter there over 1.5 metres high. Technically a normal-sized person, I was only 1.52 metres high, so if I knew I was going to be passing through Wangaratta, I would make sure I gave myself a bouffant hairstyle that day, or do a plait that I coiled on top of my head. At least Fontana, the guy who was permanently behind the counter, would know there was actually someone there. Fontana was the guy who first mentioned that I was probably the shortest truck driver in the whole world, but I put a stop to his highfaluting ideas. He had lots of certificates showing that he had sold the oldest technically edible hotdog in the region, and signed photos from the swarthiest or the most alcoholic truck driver, etc. but I didn�t want to be another two dimensional item on this guy�s grubby wall.

Nobody knew how rich I was, except the people in my street, I guess, but I never saw them. They themselves were too rich to be out wandering around on the footpath, noticing each other. I wasn�t rich in a liquid asset kind of way, anyway. I just had a ridiculous sized mansion, full of tasteful, matching, unused furniture. It had a fountain in the front yard, a patio in the back, a stupid pool in the shape of a dollar sign so it was uncomfortable to swim in (whenever I tried, which was twice, I kept finding myself flailing around in the ends of the S), full of leaves, two main bedrooms, a guest room with twin beds, and just a whole bunch of other random crap that I never looked at and nobody else ever saw. It was the loneliest place in the world.

The massive TV I had in the rumpus room was pretty good. I left it on all day and all night, murmuring in the background. The house had twenty solar panels, so I figured that was OK, environmentally-wise. Besides that, I knew that it was necessary for my sanity.

I was hardly ever there, though. I was hauling experimental bicycles all over the southern half of Australia in my big rig, and when I was home, the experience was generally overshadowed by the task of me trying to park my truck on my dainty tessellated flagstone driveway. In a way, I chose this house, but really, it was ninety percent fate.

This particular day, I had woken up at six AM and dried my hair after my tepid three-star motel shower by hanging my head upside-down and brushing the wrong way so I ended up looking like I�d had an electric shock. I knew that I�d be wanting a chiko roll quickly today. I left my brown motel room in Canberra behind and the six hundred newly developed heat-seeking bicycles I�d delivered to the Federal Police headquarters yesterday.

I was out on the open road by eight. The sun was high and a few trucks boomed past me going the other way. I never waved at anyone, or honked in recognition or solidarity. I think that�s what real truckers are supposed to do at each other. That wasn�t my thing. As one truck went by, I thought I caught a glimpse of the swarthiest truck driver on Fontana�s wall. I made me salivate. Not the swarthiness; the thought of Fontana�s and the chiko roll waiting for me in that disgusting finger-printed glass and metal case. It was an eleven AM fix. Just a couple of hundred kilometres to go.

It was hard not to let my mind wander to the events of the last year as I trundled back and forth between the big cities, and Woomera. Woomera Rocket Range tended to require a hell of a lot of experimental bicycles in a large range of colours for some reason. I never asked questions. Maybe I should have. It was getting harder to keep my mind on the job as the year went by. I took this job because I thought my mind would be all taken up with thinking about driving and changing huge chunky gears and where the hell I was going but I was starting to know exactly where to go and where the M1 had all its bendy bits and I no longer looked at the gears. I could even tell exactly how fast I was going because when I broke the speed limit, the truck sounded like a team of demons had invaded the bonnet. I was getting so that I could tell when the demon sound was about to happen. This wasn�t good. The more I did this job, the more my mind cleared up. And the more my mind cleared up, the more things invaded it. I was beginning to think that I needed a new job.

As soon as I got to the truck stop at Wangaratta, the thought did cross my mind that I had finally gone too far on this electric shock hairstyle I was sporting. Plus, the wind through the open window had flattened it so that all of it was now sticking out behind me. I knew that I would have to do some serious aerial acrobatics to get noticed.

As I leapt up and down in front of the counter, trying to make my order, Fontana said, �Hey, gal, I know you don�t think you�re necessarily the shortest truck driver in the world, but you�re sure as shit got to have the weirdest hairstyles. How does that sound to you?� I envisioned a black-and-white overexposed printout of myself with the electric shock hairstyle tacked to the grubby wall next to the signed printout of the tentatively swarthiest truck driver in the world. The printout of that guy was nearly undiscernible from the background he was standing against. He was just too swarthy for a good black-and-white shot.

The next time I jumped up to say something along the lines of, �Yeah, but no thanks,� to the photo, he casually took a shot of me with his digital camera and then promptly put it under the counter. Great. Now the photo of me had a shit hairdo, I was talking, and I was leaping, and I knew that Fontana�s old printer did no-one any aesthetic favours.

�You can sign it next time,� he said. As I walked off with my chiko roll and horizontal hair, I resigned myself to the fact that it would be the last time I ever set foot in there. I�d have to wait until one PM and my journey into the town with the inexplicable submarine in the middle of it for my chiko roll fix from now on. At least I could stop inventing tall hairstyles now. Then again, the stupid hairstyles were in part devised to keep my mind off the events of last November.

I never looked to my left when I left Wangaratta. I turned on the radio and listened to the static as it slowly congealed over the next four hours into decipherable talkback.

I felt like shit and I�d been in this crappy rut for months. I couldn�t bring myself to say anything or do anything. I always had a lump in my throat. Every waking moment. The stupid house I technically lived in had a lot to do with it. I wished I�d never bought that ridiculously expensive raffle ticket with the money my parents had given me to buy the ballet textbook I needed. Then I wouldn�t have won the house and the BMW that lay mouldering in the three-car garage. I couldn�t sell the house for reasons I couldn�t explain to myself, and I couldn�t escape the metaphorical silence when I was in the house, either. I think that both had something to do with guilt. The house was a lavish, two-storey millstone I felt resigned to living with. I�d made a choice, and events were set into motion of which I had no control.

Fuck it; I didn�t want to think about those events.

I took a deep breath and bent my will with great exertion to listen to the static. The radio was insidious. At first, I could hear mumbling, and then instead of someone�s inflammatory opinions, the first words I could decipher were, �It�s November 1, the start of the official bushfire season.� I looked out of my window to the right. Mist hung in the air. The ex-volcanic hills with the crags that ran along the road were smothered in grass and yellow flowers. The rest of the landscape was lost in droopy clouds. The weather was an arsehole. It mocked you, then it unleashed its fury on a still day. I hated the idea of the looming summer more than anything else in the world.

The first thing you see of Melbourne when you come in from the north is the middle-of-nowhere houses that stretch for eons. Then come the places with actual trees in their yards. Then come the bits where I legally have to use a particular set of breaks. Then, eventually, would come the bit where I get near my house. I hated that bit. Pulling into the drive was a pain in the arse. I fucking hated that driveway. My street was too dainty, and the truck felt incongruous. I felt incongruous. I felt incongruous anywhere, anytime.

On this particular trip home, I couldn�t face getting home in the daytime. This wasn�t such an unusual occurrence. The house looked so defiantly normal in the daytime. I parked the truck in Moonee Ponds and sat in its shade. Then, I found some random take-away and ate some grease-coated stuff. The shadows got long. I started to get chilly. The world wound down and I slowly wended my way through the suburbs to Balwyn. That�s where my house was. The tops of the trees tickled my cab as I turned into my street. My eyes itched as the closing blossoms next door went up my nose. I scraped the sides of the cab on the fancy iron gate as I backed into my driveway. Shit. I pretty much always did that. I went forward, back, forward, back, each time scraping my truck and bending my fence just a little bit more.

I was pissed off. I gave up and just left the truck half-sticking out of my vast property and I crawled out of the window, just as the sun took the twilight with it. I crossed the lawn and fumbled with my keys. I got inside and ran down the endless corridor to the rumpus room where I flicked on the TV. I shut the double doors and pushed two chairs in front of them. I always did that. I changed into my pjs I left on the couch, and then climbed into the slightly singed sleeping bag I�d had since I was a kid. There was a one-year layer of dust over just about everything.

I did not notice the giant Atmospheric Skull looming over my house.