JOURNAL OF A COFFIN DODGER CHAPTER C

CHAPTER C

A warm afternoon breeze lashed greasy food wrappers, swirling them around my ankles, as I arrived at the glass door entrance to the tyre workshop.

I held the backpack in one hand and pushed the door with the other.

I stepped through the doorway and wended my way, past coils of electrical wiring and men on ladders, towards the back of the building.

I didn't see the pasty-faced slimeball. Instead, a woman greeted me as I drew close to the back wall.

'Hi! I'm June,' she said from behind the counter.

Leaning forward, she lowered her voice.

'I'm sorry about the calendars.'

June jerked her head toward the wall behind her.

'That's my husband, Alf's thing. I've told him our girls must keep out of the workshop until he takes them down.'

I, too, regretted the display of calendars with their salacious depictions of women.

However, I reckon a bloke needed an epiphany to take down those calendars.

A revelation as intense as the beam of light from a lighthouse, to pierce and enlighten his mind. A falling to his knees encounter with guilt and shame at his wanton encapsulation of women into a prurient heterosexual male fantasy world.

June straightened up, her voice competing against the shrill sound of a whirring drill.

'And please excuse the mess. Last week, rodents damaged the wiring in the ceiling, causing a fire. Electricians have set this coming Friday as the day for the lights to be fixed. I'm looking forward to having more light at this end of the shop. Now, you're here because...'

'I'd like to pick up the car that needed four new tyres.'

Lying on the countertop in front of June was a sheaf of documents. They rustled as she rifled through them.

'Ah! Here we are.'

She pulled out a document as the set of keys attached to the document jangled.

June handed the document, a receipt, with the keys to me. I scrutinised the receipt as I slipped the keys into my jeans pocket.

'Everything in order?' She smiled as I pushed the receipt in beside the keys.

I nodded as I took a credit card from my shirt pocket and handed it to her.

June looked at the screen of the computer now on the countertop and tapped on the keyboard.

With the transaction completed, she returned the credit card.

I took the card and returned it to my shirt pocket.

'Cheers!' I said. 'Thank you,' and turned away from the counter and strode out of the workshop.

I went to my car and climbed in.

With the backpack placed on the seat beside me, I

started the engine and headed out.

Into the clamorous, fume-laden throng of traffic on a road that led away from the workshop and on to places of comfort.

Such as a Macca's restaurant where I turned into a car park.

I followed the good-times aroma of frying food after I parked the car, stepped out, locked it and strolled into the restaurant to order a meal.

When my order of coffee, burgers, and fries was called, I went to the counter and picked up the tray with my meal stacked on it. I ambled to the outdoor seating area with the soothing aromas of fried food and coffee wafting around my face.

As I sat down, I congratulated myself on achieving the goal of replacing the car's tyres despite the hassle of doing so in a male-centric environment.

I took a sip of coffee and sighed with relief as I had no other scheduled meetings with men. However, rather than relaxing, a shadow sliding over the table I sat at unnerved me.

As I looked up, a man dressed in a light blue sports jacket, grey slacks, and shiny black shoes passed by as he strode towards the car park.

Though the man's face was familiar, his name, and the occasion or occasions where I had met him, eluded me.

I watched him swagger across the car park towards a group of men standing beside a line of cars.

The man joined the group, who turned and looked in my direction as I shifted my gaze and looked down at my tray of food.

When I looked up again, the men were climbing into the vehicles. The man in the light blue sports coat gave me a backward glance as he climbed into a dark blue sedan at the head of the line.

A line of five vehicles that, like the man in the sports jacket, I did not recognise as the vehicles headed out of the car park.

However, I had seen similar makes of vehicles in movies and TV shows that depicted Britain in the 1950s and 60s.

In particular, scenes from those programs that involved bobbies in vehicles with blues and twos activated.

Sirens and flashing lights, that is, similar to the ones that had interrupted my journey to Macca's about half an hour after I had collected my car from the tyre workshop.

Therefore, I stopped by the side of the road a couple of miles from Macca’s as first responders and two fire trucks hurtled past.

After they had passed, I resumed my journey to Maccas as I watched the flashing lights disappear down the road.

The lights and the sounds of the wailing sirens awoke somnolent memories of fires. Those I worry about regarding a statute of limitations.

Fires that I now write about in my Journal as the story of my life moves away from the visit to the tyre workshop and the encounter with the slimeball.

Times before that meal at Maccas and the unnerving sight of the man in the light blue sports coat. A narration of several events that had occurred years before that meal at Maccas.

In particular, a telling of my part in starting fires. Those now worrisome infernos that have the potential to expose me to legal jeopardy.

Like the fire I started in my father's shed when I exorcised his foul spirit from my mind.

A fire on Guy Fawkes night about five years before my visit to Maccas and the tyre workshop. That workshop where a pasty-faced slimeball creeped me out as he smirked behind a counter.

My father, though, was not pasty-faced as he had spent decades of his life living under the Australian sun before fleeing to England.

But he did share the slimeball's salacious fantasising about women.

A fantasising shown in its blooming putrescent glory after I gained access to Dad's shed. A long, wide timber and corrugated iron structure in his backyard several yards away from his former house.

The access that I accomplished one afternoon as the shed, like his house, needed to be cleared out as the property was to be sold.

When I first approached the shed, someone had padlocked the door shut. I didn't want to hunt through Dad's former house looking for a key, so I kicked the door in.

I entered the shed and looked through the photo albums scattered across a bench that ran below a window. Albums that were littered with photos of naked pre-pubescent females and my father's physical engagement with them.

Death had claimed my father's body about ten days before I entered his shed. A timely intervention, as he was now beyond the reach of the law and any accountability for his behaviour in this life. But I hope the flames of hell claim his soul in the next one.

While reflecting on his prayed-for eternal torment as I closed the photo albums, a thought came to mind.

I had kicked the shed door in on the afternoon preceding Guy Fawkes Night. The night of bonfires across the country.

A bonfire, say, like torching the shed. A cathartic experience to purge my soul of my father's dank, loathsome shadow.

I had a fascination with fire, its wild, untamed nature, ever since I helped set fire to a cemetery. A memorable childhood occasion decades before I broke into my father's shed and set it alight.

A time when I lived with my parents, brothers, and sisters on a property in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales.

Our property had a clear view of the local cemetery.

In fact, the unpaved road that went past our place also went past the cemetery before ending in a dead end several yards past the cemetery.

Between our place and the cemetery, on our side of the road, but a couple of hundred yards away from our house, was a park.

Dotted around the park were picnic tables, a bubbler, swings, a roundabout, and a slippery dip.

About seven or eight of us kids, on a scorching hot, windy, summer's afternoon, were playing cowboys and Indians in that place.

We raced between the tombstones, ducking, and weaving, taking potshots at each other with our fake guns.

Then our war-whoops and cries of 'Shot you! You're dead!' faded away as we stood at the entrance to a tomb.

Why its heavy metal doors lay open, none of us knew but I know it was Megs who said, 'let's have a look.'

'Yer! Like the Famous Five,' Jim added, 'let's go exploring.'

So, down a set of concrete stairs we descended into the gloomy, damp vastness of the tomb.

'Cool!' Garth said after we reached the bottom of the stairs and stood in a ragged line along the length of the tomb.

I nodded in agreement as we stared at a double row of termite-riddled shelves lining three sides of the tomb.

'I've seen coffins in cowboy movies at the pictures,' Garth continued, 'now I know what's inside them.'

'Yer! They're like the skeletons we saw in the cartoons that come on before the movies,' Jane added.

Several of the coffins lying on the shelves were falling apart, revealing their contents, confirming the accuracy of Garth's and Jane's comments.

No one spoke until Bob, his eyes sparkling with a mischievous glee, whispered,

'Imagine the fire there would be if we set the place alight.'

The silence that descended on the group following this statement was broken by Sue shouting, 'it'd be bigger than bloody cracker night!'

Her use of a verboten word had us bursting into laughter.

Laughter that ceased when Bob yelled, 'come on then. Let's get some grass.'

After we strode out of the tomb and gathered bundles of grass from around the graves, we returned to the tomb and stacked the grass under the bottom shelf.

'Right! Here goes.' Bob said as he took a box of matches from a pocket of his rugby shorts.

Bob used to filch his dad's smokes and thought it cool to light a fag when his parents weren't around. So, he always had matches.

He struck a match and lit the grass.

The choking smoke had us climbing the stairs, coughing as we went.

We caught our breath near the tomb entrance, then fled to the swings and roundabout in the park alongside the cemetery as flames erupted out of the tomb.

We splashed water on our faces from the bubbler in the centre of the park and lolled on the roundabout or sat on the swings.

After watching the fire make its swift, voracious way around the tombstones and along the grassy pathways of the cemetery, we drifted on home.

And after arriving home, I sprawled on the lounge room carpet with my siblings while we watched the black and white telly and ate Iced Vo Vo biscuits.

After 'The Mickey Mouse Club' had finished, it was time for dinner.

Then homework, story time, prayers and off to bed.

An idyllic childhood in so many ways, apart from my father's sexual predation of his children.

But now's the time for a cemetery-like memorable Guy Fawkes night bonfire, I thought as I stood outside dad's shed and planned how to burn it down. And considered consigning his former house also to the flames.

A purging of his legacy, involving petrol that I poured in and around his shed that night and the burning match I used to ignite that fuel.

A cleansing celebrated with whoops of joy, as I cheered while flames lit up the starry night sky.

I sang hymns of praise as the flames consumed the shed and its debauched contents.

I cheered as the fire spread along the trail of petrol I had poured over the grass around the shed and onwards to his house.

The flames sprinted along the fuel line, across the backyard and licked the back steps of the house.

I ceased singing, though, as blues and twos charged into my dad's backyard and stopped the fire from going beyond those back steps.

But another conflagration, however, not only consumed steps, both back, and front, about ten years before the fire in my dad's shed, but an entire building.

A heart-warming inferno that lit up a night sky, where grey clouds slithered through the pale light of a sallow moon.

A glorious blaze as two woman friends, Brenda, and Kathleen, and I took out that building, while a mournful breeze whispered ghost-like tales.

The clubhouse of an English rugby team, that is, we torched by hurling Molotov cocktails at it.

A club, whose male members enacted sordid, degenerate fantasies on the bodies of Brenda and Kathleen, about four weeks before the fire.

Those members of that rugby team were never called to account for their depraved behaviour. They therefore needed to be punished.

A fire that was an unalloyed delight as Kathleen, Brenda and I watched the Molotov cocktails flare as they slammed into the one hundred-year-old clubhouse. We then pumped the air with our fists as the fire roared and surged through that two-storey building.

We grinned and coughed while the stench of burning paint flirted with clouds of acrid smoke as the fire spurted through the building's roof.

We high-fived each other as hungry, reddish-yellow flames licked the painted timber of the adjoining grandstand. And left the scene as the incessant wailing of sirens drew closer to the site.

A third blaze, in the 1970s, decades before the other two, the one in my dad's shed and the clubhouse fire — led to murder.

In the cool grey, smoke-laced misty dawn following that fire, a body groaned. It lay underneath a once-green, upturned enamel bathtub radiating heat from the previous night's fire.

While the mist drifted over the pungent-smelling ruins, police officers stopped patrolling the boundary of the site. Instead, they turned their attention to locating the source of the moaning.

As they searched through piles of blackened bricks and other rubble, the body gave a hacking cough and expired.

The ruins had once been a sizeable decades old two-storey brick, timber, and tiled building.

One of fifty or so buildings scattered across the two hundred acres of a Sydney asylum.

A building whose lower floor housed a surgical ward and medical lecture rooms. And a building whose upper floor once housed a museum of anatomical specimens arranged according to the debunked theories of eugenics.

A building that a friend, Anne, and I looked at one winter's afternoon about a week before the fire that involved murder and discussed how to burn that building down.