(diaryland) November 02, 2009 - 11:20 a.m.

This is Chapter Two of my yesterdayly begun November Novel. Beginning is here: Balwyn Fountain

Chapter the Second

The next day, I woke up during The View. The View was something I had grown to appreciate over the last year. For me, the only thing in terms of background babble that was better than people talking was people talking over the top of each other.

I didn�t wake up because of The View, however. I woke up because somebody had rung my doorbell.

I didn�t actually know what my doorbell sounded like before that moment. I�d been out in my truck for the most part of the last year, and when I was home, nobody had ever come by.

I decided that I didn�t like the sound of my doorbell. It had a synthetic chimey sound to it, like someone had described to someone else on the phone two ideal pitches in succession from the sound of an innocuous �zen� windchime they�d heard once in their privileged childhood and the person on the other end of the phone had a computer program and they used a harp sample they distorted until they nearly got it the way the first person had described, and then a committee in business suits workshopped it at a committee retreat at a winery and then sold the sample for a large sum of money. Odds were that there were probably eighty-seven other various artificial multicultural tones in my doorbell, knowing this house. I knew that my oven had a �dinner party nibblies� mode. And an �alfresco� mode. Fucking wanky applicances.

I had a horrible feeling that the people at the door were religious types. Missionaries rarely ventured into this street in Balwyn. Nobody who is having such a life that they get to live in my street is going to have that sense of desperation you need before suddenly leaping head-first into a new and wacky religion. Didn�t know who else it could be, though.

You can count on missionaries leaving after one fruitless go at the doorbell, so I stayed in my child-sized sleeping back with my head cocked, listening for the unknown entity at the door go away. It was an impossible task, really, since from where I was, the corridor that led to the front door was probably hundreds of metres long. I�d never measured it, but it seemed that long.

Naturally, all I heard was the continuation of a very heated discussion about perfume on the giant widescreen TV. An ad break came up.

The doorbell went again. The pseudo-zen chimey two-tone sound zinged through my head. I decided this could possibly have been important. I doubted it would be Biff, my boss, as I was now officially on Annual Leave for the next three weeks. Not that Biff ever came to the door. He was always trying to get me on my mobile, and tackle me with questions about the kinds of alcoholic drinks I liked the most because I was a female and so I had inside information on other females. Et cetera. I was the only female he officially knew, except for his ex-wife, and she didn�t like answering these questions.

I extricated myself out of my sleeping bag and unblockaded the rumpus room door. I wandered down the lengthy hallway in my rumpled pyjamas and my horizontal hairstyle, which incidentally had become more vertical again since I�d slept on it. The right side of my face had wrinkly pillow marks all over it.

I took a deep breath, a breath of resignation, and I opened the front door.

A lady with blue eyeshadow, red lipstick that dared traverse the forbidden edges of her lips and clothes and jewellery with fashiony emblems all over them was standing there, looking inflamed.

I blinked at her. She took me in, and visibly tried to hold back a torrent of anger. It was half successful in my estimation.

�Hi, there. Look, my name is Maria and I live across the road. I have to say, your husband�s very noisy and visually unappealing truck has been causing me and presumably everyone else in the street some heartache over the last year-�

�I�m not married,� I said.

�Oh, that�s yours, is it?� Her face fell. �I don�t understand.�

�I drive it,� I said, unwilling to help her side of the conversation along in any way.

�Well, I don�t like it. I really think that you should reconsider your choice of vehicle, as you are not an overweight man in a singlet living in Keysborough. That�s not why I�m here, anyhow. I�m here on your doorstep today as a last resort due to the enormous balloon you have tethered to your house. I won�t stand for it. It�s macabre. It�s overshadowing my property. It does not comply with our Neighbourhood Character Overlay.�

Because it was the most preposterous thing I had ever heard, I had the ability to play it cool. This was November the second, two full days after Halloween in a country where we didn�t even celebrate Halloween, but the make-up and the clothes and the strange story could have been the result of a drunken three-day trick-or-treat cross-continental bender. I didn�t know how these rich people on my street operated.

�Alright, let�s see this balloon,� I said, and we walked up to my bent fence and turned around.

Sure enough, looming over the roof was a thirty-metre high skull. It was longer and stretchier than a real skull would be which made it even more repulsive. It was slightly transparent and wafty. It didn�t actually look like a balloon. It was less defined around the edges than a balloon. Also, balloons have strings, and this one just seemed to peter off at the bottom like a typical genie, and appeared to have its source in the fountain I never turned on in my front yard. Not that genies are typical.

I didn�t mention any of this. I decided to put these observations in the back of my mind. I was still suspicious of this lady from across the road who I�d never seen before.

�You did it,� I said to her.

�I most certainly did not,� she answered, tersely. �Why on earth would I come into your yard, tie a thirty-metre high balloon to your house, and then ring your doorbell and complain about it?�

�Because you have so much money that the only thing you�d never bought before was a skull-shaped balloon, and you had nothing to do today as usual, I suspect, and you enjoy making trouble, most likely.�

�You�re the one with the truck,� she said. �You probably trucked that balloon in from wherever you go all the time. I only drive a Land Rover.�

�OK. So, since I don�t remember acquiring this skull to put above my house, I must have done it in the last fourteen and a half hours I was asleep. I must have driven to Bunnings, purchased the skull, brought it home, inflated it, and tied it to my fountain. And while we�re at it, I don�t know why we keep referring to it as a balloon because it is very clearly not at all a balloon.�

�It is a balloon,� the unpleasant lady said angrily, �and it is horrible, and you must remove it at once. I won�t stand for it!�

The balance had momentarily tipped from being freaked out that an Atmospheric Skull was emanating from my disused fountain to being pissed off at this shrill, heavily tanned lady in my yard. �As far as I know, the air thirty metres above my property is my own, yeah? Isn�t that my own personal airspace? So, I�m making the most of it.�

�I�ll have you know that any extensions to your house require a Town Planning Permit, and the Height Overlay Restriction for this street is nine metres. So tear it down at once!�

�I bet you�ve been on the phone to the council all morning. God, you�re so fucking bored with your life, aren�t you, that you have to go and make everybody else�s life a complete misery, and your husband probably doesn�t even sleep in the same room as you anymore, you�re so UV-damaged and sticky from all that bizarre make-up!� I stormed across the yard, back to my front door.

�At least I have a husband!� She screeched, as I slammed my solid-core, eight-panelled door shut.

Ugh, I thought, leaning against my front door, looking down my endless corridor. There was an Atmospheric Skull above my house. The horrible lady would leave eventually, but the Atmospheric Skull � how long would it loom there? I shivered. It was chilling. It had been wafting there, silently. Did it develop in the night? Was the top of my roof now haunted? Was this house in fact built upon an Indian Burial Ground? Unlikely, since I was located in Australia. But, fuck, there certainly was something very, very wrong right now.

I dragged myself back to the rumpus room with my gaze glued to the floor. I dared not look up, in case blood was planning on oozing from the ceiling cornices. I had a horrible premonition that the skull would slowly descend into the house over the course of the day and I�d have to walk through the jaws of it in order to get to the bathroom. I decided to quickly grab a bucket from the laundry in case worst came to worst and toilet breaks were required in the rumpus room. And then I grabbed a blanket and set up a tent over my sleeping bag and put lots of armchairs around me. I crawled back in and lay there with my sunglasses on.

The babbling on The View had lost all its power. The Atmospheric Skull over my house had me scared shitless.

I knew in my heart of hearts that the Atmospheric Skull was not made by humans. Nor was it made by machines made by humans. Nor, in fact, was it made by machines made by machines made by humans. It was not a micro low-pressure system that just happened to be focussed on my house.

This was no accident of nature. It was an Atmospheric Skull, an insidious, cryptic symbol of something, no doubt, advertising itself to the world. Maybe it was trying to tell people what had happened last year. About how this house was won and then everything else was lost. Maybe the dark places in my mind had all agreed to get together and manifest themselves in the open, out of my reach.

I managed to fall asleep with my sunglasses on and dreamt of nothing. It was a thick, unmoving sleep. It was the kind of sleep your body doesn�t need, and you�re guaranteed to feel like another huge sleep within the hour. When I woke up, and the TV was happily going about its business with Two and a Half Men, and the reality of the last thing I remembered before I drifted off came back to me, it seemed so completely fictitious that I felt the need to go and have another look. Maybe the damned thing had even disappeared.

I kept my sunglasses on, and reluctantly made my way outside, armed with a badminton racquet to either ward off the meddling lady, or potential goblins, or the skull itself. My neighbour from across the road wasn�t there. The sun was just setting, and fading rays of light bounced up to clouds across the sky. The air was red. The Atmospheric Skull was still there, looming. It seemed somewhat faded, though. The pink sky went right through the Skull. Maybe it was just a meteorological freak. I wondered what Fontana could do with a picture of it. �First Atmospheric Skull Owned By a Trucker.� Yeah, he�d like that.

I ducked inside and grabbed a shuttlecock. I thwacked it into the air. It went right through the skull, and created a bit of turbulence in a tooth. Thank Christ. This awful spectre was probably going to dissipate during the night, odds were. Bummer about there now being a shuttlecock on the roof, though. It was unlikely I�d ever be motivated enough to be bothered getting up there and finding it. Oh, well. I shrugged, half at the fading Atmospheric Skull, half to myself.

I took off my sunglasses and went back inside. My posture had straightened out a bit. I�d forgotten what it was like to be relieved about something.

That was only the first strange thing that was going to happen to me that long, strange summer. Worse was yet to come.