(diaryland) November 10, 2009 - 12:53 p.m.

I dropped a bin full of glass on the ground in the driveway in the dark last night, so after I accidentally stepped on the broken bottles and had spurting gashes coming out of both feet, I kind of felt exempt from doing my novel after bthat. So I didn't. However, here now is the next installment of Balwyn Fountain.

Chapter the Seventh

Doctor Andr� handed me my copy of the book first; maybe he thought I needed it the most; and I cracked it open. It was hard to find page one.

�If you could all turn to page, ahh�.. well, the twenty-seventh page, that is actually the page that was meant to be at the front,� Doctor Andr� said.

There was a photograph of him smiling with his chin resting on his hand, wearing exactly what he was wearing now. And a bio. I glossed over his bio.

�After you�ve read that, page two seems to be on page fifteen. Please proceed there, and face each other, and ask each other the questions.�

We weren�t facing each other in the least. Vaughn sighed and fumbled with his chair. �I can�t move,� he said.

�OK, I�ll move, then,� I said, and I got up and pried my chair free, knocking the clown-shaped Michael Bolton on the way. Thank God I didn�t bump the �I ♥ MELISSA� guy, I thought. I could be an explodey bloodstain right now.

�You�re short,� said Vaughn as I tried to find a chairworthy spot opposite him so I could get through the workbook page blackened with questions as fast as possible. He didn�t say it like he was in wonderment. He didn�t say it as observational either.

�Newsflash: I know,� I said.

I sat down.

�Take off your sunglasses,� he said.

�You take off your glasses,� I said.

�That�s different. I need them to see,� he said.

�We are at a stalemate, then,� I said.

�What � is part of the reason why you�re here because your eyes are unable to withstand the meagre fifteen-watt intensity of the light the dolphin lamp on the table over there is providing?�

�I wouldn�t say that,� I answered. �Hey, can we get on with these questions? I�m hoping to get back to my house before the full moon comes up.�

I wasn�t joking.

�OK. You start,� he said. He smiled to himself again.

�Yes, I will. Question one. How do you feel right now? Question two. How would you rate that on a scale of one to ten? Question three. What is your most favourite thing in the world? Question four ��

�I think we are supposed to answer these questions,� said Vaughn.

Valid point. �OK,� I said. �What are your answers?�

�Well, to number one, pretty good. To the rest, I forgot the questions.�

�You�re pretty good? That surprises me,� I said.

�Why?� asked Vaughn, smiling again.

�Forget it,� I said, running my hands through my hair. �This is so weird and frustrating.�

�How do you feel right now?� asked Vaughn.

�Weird and frustrated,� I said.

Vaughn took the lid off his standard issue biro and ticked the first question. I didn�t think that was what you were supposed to do.

�I think you�re meant to write �weird and frustrated there,�� I said.

�I�ll do it my way, thanks,� said Vaughn.

I put my head in my hands. �I want you to be normal,� I whispered.

�What was that?� asked Vaughn, leaning forward, suddenly interested.

I didn�t want to repeat it. Instead, I said, �Are you wearing an Alien Sex Fiend t-shirt so that one day, it could be any day from here till ten years from now, or even beyond, someone with a matching Alien Sex Fiend t-shirt will walk by you and lock eyes with you for just one mere second in recognition?�

He leaned forward a little more. �That may have something to do with it. It�s also to cover my exit wounds.�

�Let�s just get on with these questions,� I said.

�I don�t feel like rating my feelings out of ten. Do you?� Asked Vaughn. �I mean, if I feel really, really tired � so tired, in fact, that I was falling asleep, then I would rate the feeling ten out of ten. Do you see where I�m going with this? The only question I�m vaguely interested in so far I what your favourite thing in the world is.�

�Stone,� I said. �Because it doesn�t move.� The second part was a lie. I had found out in the last couple of days that Parian marble was really quite mobile.

Vaughn put his finger on his chin, and thought about that answer for a while. �What do you think of the other people here?� he asked.

�That�s not one of the questions,� I said.

At that moment, Doctor Andr� clapped his hands. �Look, I�m sorry everyone, but I�m going to have to say class dismissed again early tonight, sadly. I need to take Dave to the toilet, and the train station above us shut theirs before the sun goes down. So, those of you who did not manage to have a chat last night, I think you have to spend a bit of time caching up with each other. Please fill out the first three pages before next week, if you can find them. They�re in there somewhere, I�m praying. Come on, Dave.� Doctor Andr� ushered Dave out quite quickly. Maybe Dave was really urgent.

I looked at Vaughn. He couldn�t tell. He actually seemed to look like he was having a lovely time at this ridiculous support group meeting, despite everything that had happened to him and despite all that he had said.

I asked, �Hey, uh - would you like to see my fountain?�

�Is that a euphemism?� asked Vaughn.

�No,� I said.

�Oh, then, probably not. I have to get a taxi with one of those big fat behinds, and then I have to get home, and I have to get my Mum to help me get my wheelchair on the thing that makes it go up the stairs to our apartment, and she goes to bed pretty early. Sorry.�

I suddenly felt desperate. I was choked and panicky inside. I couldn�t go back to my house again; in the last five minutes a thought had begun to congeal in the back of my brain � if I could just get one real, live person to see what I could see, even if they wandered off again not giving a flying fuck, or saying, �I wash my hands of you,� I wouldn�t be so alone. I honestly didn�t care if the fountain had sucked all the disgusting, procreating, gassy mushrooms back into its urethra and was looking innocent. I didn�t want anybody to know about how I felt, or what had happened to me last year. I wanted to keep it for myself, because it was mine. But I wanted to have an acknowledgement. An acknowledgement of me and my fucking cursed fountain, because they were physical. The churning at the bottom of my stomach could lift a bit. The tense pain in my shoulders could ease up a bit. An image of whatever was going on in my front yard would be carried around in the mind�s eye of another person, and then maybe I could stop spiralling into a fictional, closed world that didn�t stretch beyond my hallway and the fountain.

Maybe if Vaughn would just come and have a look, even from the other side of the street, I could bear to take off my sunglasses in the next month. It was pretty hard to get my eyes clean in the shower, but I was getting better at it. But even I knew that wearing huge sunglasses constantly was a sign that you were on the slide to being irretrievable, even if you were getting good at it.

�Please,� I said. I didn�t ask it.

Vaughn shifted in his tiny wheelchair; no mean feat. �Well, alright. If you can get me there and get me home, I guess I could have a look at it. It had better be pretty good, though.�

�It is and it isn�t,� I said. �But you have to come.�

People were beginning to go through the open doorway into the darkness and go on their mysterious trajectories to wherever they lived. Maybe Michael Bolton went to his unit in Doncaster where his front garden was mostly concrete that looked like fake crazy paving. Maybe the grey lady would catch a bus into the city and quietly unlock the glass door to a shop that she had to walk through to get to her neat little place on the first floor with high ceilings and a real fireplace. Maybe the Jesus guy would make his way on foot to Nazareth.

Vaughn still looked non-committal and a lump appeared in my throat.

�You have to come,� I repeated.

�Yeah, yeah, it seems so and all that,� he said, rolling tentatively around the unstacked chairs and crashing down into the hard grass on the other side of the doorway. �Where�s your car?�

�That�s it.� I pointed at my truck. I could have pointed in any direction within about a hundred and eighty degrees and it would have been accurate.

�Are you serious?� Yelled Vaughn. �You�re the hypothetical person who I�ve been swearing at within the confined of my brain who made it so that the taxi had to drop me off ages away and which meant that I had to do some off-road work in my cursed second-hand kid�s wheelchair just to get to the most disappointing and non-disabled access event I have ever experienced!�

The lump in my throat got worse. �You said before in there that you were feeling pretty good!�

�I am feeling pretty good,� said Vaughn through his teeth, �But it�s getting quite hard to maintain that emotion at this juncture.�

I realised that if I was actually going to drive Vaughn to my house to do a show-and-tell of the supernatural fountain, he would kind of have to use the ramp at the back and be all in the back for the whole ride, which may be slightly dehumanising and objectionable, especially to people who were already hissing through their teeth. The shipping crate I currently had on it was kind of cavernous and free of crates of experimental bikes, so maybe I�d have to occy strap him. I took a deep breath and conveyed this to him.

Vaughn smiled to himself for a very long time. I started fidgeting.

He breathed out of his nose. �This had better be a really, really, miraculously excellent fountain.�

I lowered the ramp and he trundled up the steep slope. He pushed his way o the very back of the shipping crate and tuned around, looking compliant in the weak moonlight. The moon had just risen above the railway station and looked terrifying. I remembered the last tie I had really looked at the full moon. It was last November, and I had been on a median strip in the middle of the road and it was wearing a deep red cloak. But now it was just pure white. I went up the ramp into the shipping crate and cast a long shadow over Vaughn. I put an occy strap across his chest and hooked it onto some diagonal struts. It didn�t look all that sturdy. We didn�t say anything to each other. The whole situation was a little weird.

I closed the shipping crate and did the big latch thing that you put across it so that nothing comes out of it. I wished I�d paid more attention in Trucking School, because then I would have known what it was actually called, but I had been pretty dazed all last summer.

I felt like I had just closed a vault at a cemetery. I was sure that this trip was going to change something.

I walked around to the driver�s door, and as I was doing that, I wondered if he needed breathing holes.

�Do you need breathing holes?� I yelled into the rectangular corrugated metal of the shipping crate.

�No. Just start the truck already, for Christ�s sake!� He yelled back.

As I opened my battered door and leapt onto my pile of cushions on the driver�s seat, I smiled to myself. This had been the first proper conversation I�d had in a whole year. I felt fucking fantastic.