(diaryland) December 01, 2009 - 8:16 a.m.

OK, this is it! This is the last chapter of the famed Balwyn Fountain! I heard they were going to make it into a movie. I may have ripped off all of my last three novels AND Lost In Translation to get to this point, but who cares! I like the ending. It's my kind of ending.

Chapter the Twenty-Third

I probably didn�t strictly need to as far as my intentions were for that day, but I did make the effort and went to work to pick up the flying ET bikes or whatever they were from the warehouse.

I was actually ten minutes early.

Biff was standing outside the warehouse in all his portly glory, his t-shirt not quite covering the vastness of his proud belly, which he had been constructing, on-and-off, for the past thirty years.

�Shit, you look shit,� he said.

�You too,� I said.

�Hey, we�ve managed to rope those little buggers all down for now but you�d better get Mark to forklift them into your truck quick smart. Back it in, mate,� he said, stubbing out a cigarette with his thong. Because it was his business, he got to shirk all workplace safety rules, and he was the only one allowed to not wear a uniform. Instead, he liked to wear the exact same too-small 1984 LA Olympics t-shirt for reasons I was never able to pinpoint.

I started to go back to my truck in order to back it into the loading bay.

�Hey, wait a sec,� said Biff.

�Yeah?� I said.

�I gotta give you the destination address.�

�Oh,� I said. I got the card off him with his cute bobbly handwriting all over it. It said that I had to go to somewhere near Point Nepean.

I thought that he was going to say something that was going to help me on my journey. Something sagely that only a truck driver of many years could think of. Kind of like that cowboy guy in the Big Lebowski, who talks about the Dude with inside knowledge and a serious drawl. But he didn�t.

I sighed and jumped into my truck. I backed it into the loading bay, meditated on life for a few minutes, and when I felt the back doors shut, I drove off. Biff waved as I went past him. He got tiny through the rear view mirror pretty fast. It was good of him not to mention the fact that I had created so many dints down the side of my big rig during the time of my annual leave.

I did not intend to go to Point Nepean. I pulled the piece of notepaper out of my pocket and went towards those co-ordinates.

As the GPS thingy led me onto the Hume Freeway, I had the pang of realisation that I was going to my old town for the first time since my parents had gone. And it was to find a box in the back yard of someone who had not lived there in many years, who was also gone. I thought that if there was somebody else living there now, in Vaughn�s old place, if they could just shoo me out of the backyard with the unburied box in my hands, that might actually be rather a welcoming sort of thing under the circumstances.

It took just over two and a half hours to get to East Shepparton. My truck was kind of slow, but I knew exactly where I was going. This was my old neighbourhood.

The grass was brown. I saw the first charred tree and I got the shivers. But I thought to myself, you�re OK. You�re just on a mission. Your parents are still here, too. Just hidden.

I drove through the streets at a snail�s pace. This was half because I had to observe certain rules in built up areas, and half because the town still wasn�t quite right. There were empty squares of land with ruins where there used to be stuff, and long-term For Sale signs on blocks of land where my Primary School friends had once lived out their lives. I took a deep breath and looked straight ahead.

The GPS led me to a street I�d been down a few times before as a kid. The black-and-white flag on the screen was leading to a green space that was not on the road. I hated it when it did things like that. And when you got out of your truck, you couldn�t follow it into the green patch on foot because it got upset that you would even try to do that since it always thought you were a car. That was why it had been so hard to deliver the floating bicycles to the reclusive man in the shack on the beach that time. So, once again, I had to do it alone.

It was pretty obvious which house the GPS was attempting to point to. So I went there. The whole street was empty.

It was a weatherboard house, probably built in the 1920s, with a For Sale sign on it. It was obvious nobody was living in it anymore. Maybe nobody had lived in it since Vaughn and his mother had gone. The black from the fires had coated the house so where it once was cream, it was now a harsh gritty black, except for the very underside of each weatherboard where the cream still showed through.

I set foot on the property and the grass crumpled under my feet. The yard was fairly overgrown. I weaved through dead rosebushes and straggly lavender whose dregs from the spring were being sucked dry by bees. I found the side gate and struggled to get the metal tab thing to unfasten it so I could get it open. No point really; things had grown into it so bad that it was tied shut a thousand times.

I went further through the rows of rose bushes and found a hole in the fence, just big enough for a dog, or me, to climb through. The wire where the fence had broken scratched me as I scrambled through.

Now I was in the backyard. It was fairly large and open and had the shade of pepper trees that was piped in from next door. I guessed this was where Vaughn Bourbon spent large swathes of his childhood, playing footy and accidentally kicking it onto the roof or worse, over the fence. Where he invited his friends over to play spiderman or whatever boys do. And where he probably spent less and less time as he turned into a teenager when his Dad started to go a bit psycho and when he started to listen to music in his room at impossible volumes all the time as teenagers do. I could practically see all this stuff being acted out in the yard in front of me. I didn�t expect the place to be so normal like this under all the rack and ruin.

I could see the purple tree; the Jackaranda, in the corner of the yard, immediately. After I stopped being busy imagining in my mind�s eye the entire duration of Vaughn�s life in Shepparton, I set to work. I was pretty sure the box wouldn�t be that hard to find.

There was a mound in between two large surface roots that looked pretty promising, so I started there. And yep, after about thirty seconds of digging around in the flaky soil with my bare hands, I found it. It was a fairly large metal case, a fair amount bigger than I had expected. But no matter, it was easy to uncover.

I sat in the dirt and opened the case up. There was a fair amount of stuff in there, the most important of which were in carefully sealed up lunch bags. Unsent letters and a collection of good-as-new stickers with the names of bands I�d never heard on them. There was a lone postcard that looked a hundred years old by itself in one of the bags. It was a sepia-toned reproduction of a painting of a young Louis XIV.

Under these bags, which I could not bring myself to open, and a CD with Vaughn�s handwriting on it, was a t-shirt. It had a note pinned to it but water had gotten to it at some point because the writing was now illegible and all washed away. I didn�t bother to unfold it. It would just probably say the name of a band on it that I�d never heard once again.

I held it up to my nose, still folded. I had a sniff. I couldn�t smell Vaughn on it, not that I actually knew how he smelt, now that I thought of it. All that happened was a bunch of dirt went up my nose.

I closed up the metal case and stood up. That was when I realised where I actually was. I was pretty short compared to the 1.8 metre regulation fence that ran along the back of Vaughn Bourbon�s property, but there were large, tumbledown parts of the paling that I could see through. I knew that this fence had been like that for at least twenty-three years, even before the fires went through.

I was looking onto the ruin of my old backyard.

As I went back through the fence into the front yard, littered with dead roses; I got a red line dotted with blood up my left leg for my efforts. I barely noticed it.

I limped over to the truck and hopped in. I threw the metal case onto the passenger seat and it clanked open. The CD with Vaughn�s handwriting on it glinted in the early afternoon sun, seeming to want to be played.

In Vaughn�s pointy hand, in the slightly more immature, innocent style of himself as a fifteen-year-old, it said, �VAUGHN B�S COOL TUNES 1979-1985�

For the first time in a year, I listened to music. I put the CD in the stereo and started up the truck.

As I slowly drove out of the edges of Shepparton, never to return again, the Ronettes style drums kicked in. And then a type of fuzzy music I�d never heard before.

Listen to the girl
As she takes on half the world
Moving up and so alive
In her honey dripping beehive
Beehive
It's good, so good, it's so good
So good

Walking back to you
Is the hardest thing that
I can do

I drove away in a cloud wrapped around the inside of my head.

Before I knew it, I was back at the huge, dusty house in Balwyn with the broken fountain out the front of it. I took the CD out of the stereo and stopped the truck in the driveway. The CD went back into the metal case; everything was back in place. I snapped the case shut as best I could do with such a battered, warped and weathered thing.

I walked through my front yard and stepped over the headless statue. It would be in a museum one day. The sound of the spontaneously flying bikes in the back of the truck thudding against the sides of the crate they were in was kind of comforting, like the world could go on afterwards. I gripped the handle of the metal case tightly.

And then I jumped into the fountain.