Kasey
While her mother was busy getting dressed so that Zach could drive her to work, Kasey was wandering down to the train station to go to school. Kasey was due to finish Year Eleven in two weeks and after that there was only a year to go before she was blessedly free of the public school system. For Kasey, the end of high school couldn't come soon enough. She was a moderately good student, but would definitely not be getting dux this year, she was enough of a realist even at sixteen to recognise that. Kasey had a dream of living on her own, maybe with a few good friends, of working somewhere so that she had own money to spend on whatever she wanted, with no parents telling her what was 'sensible', or what was a 'waste of money'. She was considering going to university, only because her parents expected it, and thought that perhaps doing an arts degree would be a good way to spend a few years of her life. That way, her parents would be happy because she was doing further study, and she would be doing something that, she assumed, wouldn't be too taxing on the brain. Above all, Kasey disliked studying. If she could get a degree by drawing a few pictures and being Creative, then that was what she intended to do.
Kasey had developed a love for art since she met her boyfriend two and half months ago. He was quite a lot older than her, older than her mother even, although she would never dare to tell her about him. He didn't act like an old guy though, he was daring and funny and, more to the point, artistic. He did fabulous oil paintings with what seemed thousands of swirled colours that made her feel as though she was falling into a hole like Alice down the rabbit hole - down into a crazy, mixed-up world where colour became touch, taste, and scent all at once. Kasey found drawings of recognisable pictures - cows and fruit and vases of flowers - to be predictable and boring. But her boyfriend's paintings were imaginative, complex and completely enthralling. Yesterday after school, she had stood in front of one of his paintings for close to twenty minutes, and would have stayed longer if her boyfriend hadn't started to undress her as she stared, entranced. He was so passionate, she mused, recalling how they had spent the afternoon curled up on his bed, him teaching her things no boy her own age would ever know. She felt so lucky to have such an imaginative, talented and loving man. And a man too, not a boy like the kids she went to school with. How could Brianna, her best friend, be even remotely interested in those boys? She just couldn't see the attraction in them at all.
Absorbed in her ponderings, Kasey did not at first notice the commotion around the train station, but as she came closer a small group of people broke away from the larger mob near the car park end of the platform. Through the gap they left Kasey suddenly noticed a strip of tape, flapping loosely in the slight breeze. Although she had never before seen it in real life, she had certainly seen enough cop shows on television to recognise it for what it was - police tape. Thoughts of boys, art and friends suddenly banished from her mind, she stopped, shielded her eyes against the November sun sitting low on the horizon and tried to work out what was going on.
Directly in front of her was the wooden stairs that led up and over the train line to the city-bound platform, which was where Kasey had been heading. Police tape was now covering the span between the hand rails not just on this side but also, she realised, from the other side of the tracks as well. While the staircase was empty, people having been deterred by the copious amounts of tape, and the city-bound platform appeared deserted, the outbound platform was packed with people standing shoulder to shoulder. There were also people standing in huddles through the long grass at the end of the platform, spilling out into the car park, which was full. On closer inspection she saw her mother's silver Fairlane, with the ELOU15 vanity number plates, surrounded on all sides by police vehicles, parked hastily and haphazardly across the white painted lines. All the people, both in uniform and those without, appeared to just be standing around, Kasey couldn't see what the cause of the commotion was, but it appeared to be out in the grass near her mother's car, just on the other side of the little white fence at the end of the outward-bound platform. She knew her mother usually took the 6:14 to the city in the morning, and that she had left that morning at the usual time, so it was not strange that her car was here - after all, Kasey saw it parked in the same spot every morning when she came down to catch the train to school. She had complained that Elouise should go in to work at a normal time, like regular people, so that she could drive Kasey to the station and save her the walk, but her mother had fobbed her off, explaining that it was important that she be at work early. Her mother was the personal assistant to one of the three partners of a big legal firm in the city, and she had explained to Kasey that she needed to make sure she was at work before her boss, so that she could have everything ready for him. Kasey thought that it sounded like an awful lot of arse kissing, but had wisely kept this opinion to herself.
Kasey didn't feel frightened, standing on the footpath down the road slightly from the station, watching the commotion. If anything, she was excited - something different was happening! After all, it wasn't every day you got to see the station wrapped up like a birthday present with police tape and with cops crawling all over it. Seeing her mother's car in the middle of all the chaos made her slightly uneasy, but the sheer excitement of the event was overshadowing any nervousness she might be feeling, at least for now. Snapping back to reality, Kasey realised that she wasn't going to be able to get to school this morning. She wasn't displeased, at least she had a fantastic story to tell.
Kasey swung her backpack off one shoulder, so she could paw through it for her mobile phone. She found it in a front pocket, pulled it out and speed-dialled her Mum's work number. It rang and rang ... paused slightly, then rang again, indicating that her call had been transferred to the front reception desk. Kasey thought that her mother must be in a meeting with her boss - it was likely that the CEO had just arrived and Elouise was busy running around getting him a cup of coffee or something she supposed. After what felt like an eternity of ringing, finally a prim voice said "Woodworth, Schultz and Bird, can I help you?"
"Ah, hi. I need to talk to Elouise Walker? I'm her daughter, and it's an emergency?"
"Please hold. I'll transfer you to her desk."
Kasey did as she was told, watching the activity on the station and praying she didn't run out of credit on her phone before Elouise answered. The phone rang five more times before it was finally picked up again, this time by a man with an uncertain, "Er ... Hello? Elouise's desk."
"Hi, who's this? I'm looking for Elouise Walker, it's Kasey ..."
"Oh hi, Kasey, this is Lawrence - Larry - your Mum isn't in yet. Can I give her a message or something?"
Kasey frowned as Lawrence gave her this information, staring over at the station as pieces slowly slotted into place - her Mum's sedan in the usual place, the police cars in the car park, the tape everywhere, her Mum not at work ... "Oh ... My God ..." she breathed into the phone, "Larry, I think something awful might have happened ..."
"Something awful?" Larry repeated, dumbstruck, "What do you mean, Kasey? Kasey?" But the line was dead, Kasey was gone.
Brianna
Despite the loud music pouring into her ears from the mp3 player, Brianna noticed that there was something going on at the station as soon as she turned the corner. She approached from the car park end of the platform, and as a general rule she met Kasey at the foot of the stairs leading over the tracks. This morning, however, there was definitely some kind of a problem - cars, much more than normal, were parked in no particular order all over the car park, there was a massive amount of people milling around, although none seemed to be actually doing anything to speak of. The centre of the melee seemed to be in the long grass in between the car park and the end of the outbound platform, but Brianna couldn't see what the focus of their concentration was on, there was too much of a crowd, and whatever it was was well hidden in the paspalum.
Brianna slowed her pace, in order to more fully concentrate on the commotion at the platform. She was merely curious, had not yet realised the implications of what might be going on. Only as she noticed the large amount of uniforms, and the swinging, flapping police tape that was draped liberally around the place, did she start to realise that something pretty majorly serious must have happened. Oblivious to the turmoil Brianna was now experiencing, Avril Lavigne continued to yell in her ears, "'Cause life's like this. Uh huh, uh huh, that's the way it is". Brianna stepped onto the coarse gravel at the farthest end of the car park, and stopped to pull the headphones out of her ears. Avril was reduced to a tinny whistle from the ear bud speakers until Brianna killed even that by hitting the power button on the iPod. The silence was pierced only by the murmur of voices from the railway platform.
Brianna's usually sunny face had clouded over, and she surveyed the scene with troubled eyes, wondering where her friend might be, and worrying that she might not be able to find Kasey's familiar face in the crowd. Then, thankfully, her eyes fell on a familiar figure in a school uniform close to the bottom of the pedestrian overpass. Brianna broke into a run and, as she drew closer to Kasey she saw her friend bring her phone down from her face, and stare at it as though she had no idea what it was.
"Kasey!" she yelled as she ran towards her, "Kasey!"
Kasey turned as though in a daydream, and Brianna could see her speaking although she could not hear the words. As Brianna drew alongside her, she wrapped her arms around her oldest friend, "Kasey, what's happened? What's going on? Are you ok?"
Kasey pulled away from her grasp, and Brianna looked her in the eyes, trying to decipher what lay behind them. Contraband mascara ran down Kasey's tear-streaked face as she dragged her eyes from Brianna's gaze and dropped her eyes to the ground. She pressed her lips together tightly, as though she didn't want to let the words out, and kicked a coke bottle lid along the ground with the scuffed toe of her school shoe. Brianna reached out a hand and swiped the black tinted tears from her friend's face, creating a ghoulish grey blusher on both sides of her nose, and Kasey looked up again, her lips still pressed together. All the blood appeared to have drained from her face, and her hair had come loose from the elastic holding it. "Bree," she said in a whisper, "I think that might be my Mum down there."
Robert
Summonsed by an hysterical phone call from his daughter's best friend, Robert had no idea what kind of situation he was about to drive into but, whatever it was, he was getting there fast. Pushing his work car to its limit, he had run every yellow light from work to the Redton train station, his brain on hold, simply refusing to entertain any kind of possibilities, in fact pretty much refusing to think of anything at all except the fastest way to get back to Redton. He screamed through the final intersection, hooked a sharp right hand turn on to Station Road, just about putting the Prius onto two wheels, its little electric engine protesting. The crowd around the station hove into view through Robert's passenger side window and he suddenly braked, stopping the car in the middle of the road, and taking a bare second to take in the scene that suddenly presented itself to him. For some reason he had believed that, once he got here, it would turn out that the girls had played a practical joke, that there would be nothing out of the ordinary. He would be able to yell at Kasey for wasting his time, and his perfectly ordinary life could go on in its perfectly ordinary manner. In the same second, he had realised all along that that was not going to happen, that it had been a mere hope, and that he had known this as soon as he had heard Brianna's strangled voice on the telephone, and Kasey's weeping in the background.
Robert slowly eased the car to the side of the road, hardly tearing his eyes from the cluster of people at the station, and stepped out onto the road. He left the keys in the ignition - they weren't important right now. Right now, he needed to find his daughter, and then, he needed to find out what had happened to his wife. Panicky, his gaze skittered over the crowd, searching for a school uniform and blonde hair - he couldn't remember how Kasey had done her hair this morning, and he mentally cursed himself for not taking more notice. Then, above the murmur of the crowd, he heard a voice yell out, "Dad! Rob! Over here!" Robert whipped his head around to see his daughter bearing down on him at a run from the other end of the station, finally crash tackling him with an embrace. Brianna was not far behind her, and he met her eyes over Kasey's head. Brianna shrugged, as if to say she had no idea what was going on. Rob thought she probably had a better idea than he did, but didn't push the issue, the poor girl looked petrified.
Slowly, he extricated himself from Kasey's grasp, bent his head slightly to look in her eyes, and asked her to tell him what had happened. Haltingly at first and eventually with a gush of words that flowed without the benefit of punctuation, Kasey told her story, from walking to the station and seeing the police tape, to ringing the law firm and speaking to Lawrence. Slowly, like a gushing tap slowing to a drip, Kasey's flow of words slowed, then halted. She looked as though she had sagged, somehow, Rob thought absently, as his mind whirled trying to piece together the information he had just received. His natural ability to deny, deny, kicked in and his first thought was that nothing was confirmed, it was a series of events that were not necessarily linked. Simultaneously, and in contradiction to his better reasoning, he started to panic.
With a massive effort, he took a breath, grabbed Kasey around the shoulders, and led her to the kerb to sit down. Kasey looked shrunken, haunted. Rob watched her pull her knees into her chest and curl into a tight ball, and he wrapped what he hoped was a fatherly, comforting arm around her. Brianna sank down on the other side of her friend, and copied the gesture, looking like what she really wanted was someone to do the same for her.
Softly, trying not to upset her, Rob asked her if she had gone down to the platform to speak to any of the police lingering there. Kasey shook her head, no. Rob fell silent, pondering his next move, then spoke again, "Kasey, baby-girl, I'm going to walk down there and see what I can find out. I'm not going to be gone for very long. Can you sit here with Brianna for a little while?"
Kasey responded with silence, and Rob thought that she hadn't heard him. He opened his mouth to repeat himself, but then saw Kasey's shoulders lift slowly, and fall, "OK" she said softly, barely audible.
Rob rose, planting a kiss on the top of her head, "I love you, Kiddo. I'll be right back." he murmured into the tangle of blonde hair.
Rob steeled himself mentally for what might come next, ducked under a line of police tape, and headed down into the crowd of people. Once he reached the platform, it became obvious that there were not as many people as it had seemed from the car park. He elbowed his way through to the centre of the crowd, most of whom were in emergency services uniforms. It seemed as though people were just standing around in knots, waiting for something to happen. Rob and the two teenage girls had proven to be a distraction for most, it seemed, and they were curious. Rob got to the end of the platform and stopped before stepping into the trampled grass. The scene that had been obscured by milling people before, now laid itself out before him, and he drew a sharp breath as he took it in. The body, for it was clear that was what it was, despite it being shrouded by a filthy blanket, seemed to be lying on its side, with knees drawn up into its chest. The position reminded him horribly of how Kasey had sat drawn up on the kerb. He fought down the bile that rose in the back of his throat, and turned his face skyward to ward off the tears that threatened. Only slightly calmed, he looked down again, to find he was being stared at by a man in a blue police uniform. Robert cleared his throat softly, willing his voice to work, and opened his mouth to speak. Before any words had formed on his tongue, though, the police officer rebuked him, "Sir, I don't know what you think you are doing, but this is my crime scene. You had better have a good reason for having trampled on it." the voice was rough, the words callous, but Robert sensed that he had been given a chance, albeit minor, to offer his case before being hauled off the platform.
"Umm, I don't ... My wife ... She ..." Words failing him, Robert pointed with a shaking finger at the body that lay under the blanket, felt the bile rise in his throat and his eyes wash with tears. He vomited violently on the concrete of the platform, his knees gave way, and he sank to the ground, hands grabbing his body as he went down. Robert let them take him, all the fight having left him.
Brianna
Brianna sat silently beside Kasey on the kerb, awash with emotion. She was afraid, scared, nervous, upset, but somehow recognised that what she was feeling was not even a fraction of what Kasey must be going through. She was starting to come to grips with the situation though, starting to lose that feeling that the world had just been set afloat on an uncertain and unpredictable sea.
She heard a commotion down on the platform and decided to stand up and have a look at what was going on down there. She stood, but didn't move away from the kerb - she didn't want Kasey to think that she was going to leave. Through the scrubby trees at the edge of footpath, Brianna could see down onto the platform. There didn't seem to be as many people now and those that were there all appeared to be in uniforms of one description or another. She could see a huddle of people right on the edge of the platform, where the gap next to the fence let you step down onto the grass. A group of people leaned over someone who appeared to be lying on the ground. With a start she realised that it was Kasey's Dad, it looked like he had passed out or something. Her heart stopped, and then she watched as they got him to sit up on the edge of the platform, his back to the fence and his knees pulled up to his chest. Brianna let go of the breath she didn't realise she'd been holding as he lifted his head, spoke to someone, and took an offered bottle of water. He was alright, it seemed.
Brianna let her gaze move over into the grass. Large pieces of black plastic had been put up around the grassed area to block the site off from public scrutiny, but it did not hamper the views from above. The police officers, noticeable in their neat hats and light blue, short-sleeved shirts, all appeared to be hanging back a bit more now. It looked as though some forensic investigators had arrived, and gloved and gowned, they were now poking around in the grass. Finally, she let her eyes fall on what she had been so far avoiding, the shrouded bundle in the centre of the trampled grass. She couldn't adequately see through the trees, but it definitely appeared to be a body, covered over with a blanket or something similar. She shuddered slightly, trying to keep her composure, and wondered if it could really be Kasey's Mum. She knew Elouise arrived early to the train station, Kasey had bitched about it often - that if Elouise left later Kasey would be able to get a lift - and Briana assumed that something could have happened to Elouise when she arrived. There wouldn't be very many people around at that time of day, she assumed.
Idly, Brianna pieced together the story Kasey had blurted to her father only minutes before, and tried to work out how Kasey could be so certain that something terrible had befallen her mother. It seemed as though it was possible that this event could have happened after Elouise passed through, or even before, if no one had discovered it yet. Although that didn't explain why she wasn’t at work when Kasey had called. On impulse, Brianna pulled her own mobile phone out of her pocket, still there from when she had called Robert. She knew she had to call her own parents at some stage, let them know what had happened, but first she wanted to try and call Elouise.
Kneeling down beside Kasey again, Brianna touched her lightly on the arm, and told her that she was just going to go and make a phone call, that she'd be right back. She waited for Kasey's nod, and wandered over towards the empty end of the railway station, hopefully out of earshot of her friend. She brought up the contacts lists stored in her phone, and scrolled down to E, she smiled slightly as she found the number she wanted and pressed the call button. The mobile phone in Elouise's handbag began to ring and Brianna heard a click then a familiar voice, "Elouise Walker speaking".
Monday - 06:14am to the City
Shannen
Shannen checked her watch as she approached the station and didn't quite break into a run, but picked up her pace so that it would not be much of a stretch if she chose to. The 6:14 was due in less than a minute, and she hadn't bought a ticket yet. Silently and without breaking pace, she sent up a prayer to whoever was listening: for once, make sure that train runs late. As she approached the car park she saw a dark-haired woman getting out of a late model silver sedan, apparently humming to herself. Shannen saw her most mornings, knew she got off the train at Central, and had marvelled at how happy she always seemed to be. Shannen saw her every morning, nodded and smiled every morning, noticed when she had washed her hair, knew what different outfits she owned, yet did not know her name. Shannen had often pondered the senseless cocoon that people routinely tried to wrap themselves in on public transport, but she did not have the time for such deep thoughts this morning - if she missed this train she would be late for work at the supermarket for the third time this week, and she would be damned if she would lose a perfectly good job because she was hanging around a train station philosophising.
Shannen brushed past the other woman as she closed the car door and locked it, and on a whim, decided to head through the long grass and up to the station, rather than going the long way around to the overpass. She knew she would be able to pick up some more speed running along the empty outbound platform than she could across the rough and broken footpath. She took two steps into the long grass, and was preparing to vault through the narrow gap beside the fence up on to the platform, when something buried in the grass caught the toe of her shoe and tangled in her ankles. Shannen cried out and fell hard on the still slightly dewy ground, and felt her knee land on a strange, unnatural bulge in the ground. Looking down, almost dreamlike, she saw a blanket lying in the grass, covered with filth and for a moment could not fathom what it might mean. Time, which had previously been racing, now slowed and seemed almost to stop, as her gaze traversed the length of the blanket-covered object and finally alighted upon a bare, pink, human toe. Shannen had time to analyse the nicely cut toe nail, the pink, sparkly polish that had started to wear along the cut edge, and finally her voice caught up to her vision, and she began to scream.
Elouise
Elouise grabbed her bag off the passenger seat, got out of the car and turned to close the door and lock it. As she did, a young brunette woman dashed past her, in an obvious hurry. Elouise checked her watch and realised the train was due any minute. She wasn't overly concerned, the only reason she took the early train was so that she could spend more time with Zach, who she knew would be waiting for her at Central, but she had no intention of raising a sweat and breaking a heel to catch it - there would another along in fifteen minutes, and she certainly did not want to look a wreck for Zach.
Humming tuneless nonsense to herself, she turned away from the dashing woman, locked the car, and began to walk up the footpath that led to the pedestrian overpass. She was in too good a mood to worry about the broken pieces in the concrete, simply stepping over the potholes, taking the opportunity to admire her new shoes as she did so. They were a grey fabric, with lovely black patent toes and a ridiculously high heel. She had spent way too much money on them, imagining what Zach might think of her purchase as she handed over the credit card that was in her husband's name. Rob had not noticed that she had new shoes, but then she had not expected him to.
Eloise was just completing her crossing of the overpass as the train came to a clanking, brake-squealing, shuddering halt beneath her. She quickly trotted down the steps on the other side, thankful that she had a ten trip ticket that had not yet expired, and boarded the train just as the guard's whistle blew. She did not see Shannen fall in the grass on the opposite side of the platform, and she did not hear the scream that pierced the Monday morning of a working week that was going to be far from ordinary.
Zach
Zachary waited at Central at the farthest end of Platform Eight. Elouise was due to arrive in less than three minutes, and suddenly Zach felt nervous. He had trouble pinpointing the source of this nervousness, and after a minute or so of reasonably shallow searching - Zach made it a point not to ever delve too deeply into his emotions - he eventually blamed it on an underlying sense of ever present guilt. He had been seeing Elouise for about three years now, they met right here at the end of Platform Eight five mornings a week, and in that time Zach felt he had learnt just about all there was to learn about Elouise. She was attractive, and about ten years younger than him, which made her instantly eligible in Zach's eyes, but he had started to feel the affair fade in the past few months and he was in two minds about what to do about it. Zach knew he was not the kind of man to settle down, let's face it, he'd been single for 43 years, he wasn't about to change his habits now, and the relationship with Elouise had started to sink into a routine. They met in the early hours at the station, they drove round to his studio in Frank street, they fucked, then he drove her to work. Not that he was complaining about the sex, even bad sex in Zach's book was still worth having, but he was bored. He knew what she liked, she knew what he liked, and the fun and spontaneity had winked out like a light bulb at the end of its life. If Zach and Elouise had have been married, or in an open, less clandestine relationship, he thought he would probably put in the effort and try and revive the sexual energy that had existed between them for so long. But he was tired, he was bored, and he simply did not feel that Elouise was worth it. She was getting older, her looks would start to fade before too much longer, and he made a point never to hang around that long. What had once been exciting, passionate and somehow dirty and erotic, had now become routine, boring and joyless. He had to end it.
The train pulled into the station, a minute late, and Zach watched as people poured off the last carriage. Elouise was not one of them. Zach gave an involuntary sigh of relief and rose to leave, thinking that he would go online later on and catch her at work, that she would explain how she missed the train, that she was devastated he hadn't waited. He would apologise, bring her flowers tomorrow, and then do the deed that he had been putting off for so long. Zach had taken just one step toward the exit when he was nearly bowled over by Elouise at a full run.
"Oh, Zach, baby! There you are! I almost missed the train, had to get on at the other end. Oh, I'm so glad I caught you!" Elouise's words came out in a breathless rush, the last sentence spoken directly into Zach's shoulder as they embraced.
"Baby doll ... Elly! Settle down, I can feel your heart racing." he pulled her away from his chest, looked her up and down appraisingly, taking in her heaving chest and the red flush that crept from her neck and down into her cleavage. He opened his mouth to give her the bad news, but at the last moment noticed the swelling in his trousers. Ah, what the hell, he thought, one more day wouldn't hurt, "Come on Babe, let's go, huh?"
Elouise grinned, nodded and stuck one toe out in front her, "What do you think, Baby?"
Zach swallowed a groan, plastered a smile on his face, and started to lead her out of the train station, "I love them! Did you get them on the weekend?"
Shannen checked her watch as she approached the station and didn't quite break into a run, but picked up her pace so that it would not be much of a stretch if she chose to. The 6:14 was due in less than a minute, and she hadn't bought a ticket yet. Silently and without breaking pace, she sent up a prayer to whoever was listening: for once, make sure that train runs late. As she approached the car park she saw a dark-haired woman getting out of a late model silver sedan, apparently humming to herself. Shannen saw her most mornings, knew she got off the train at Central, and had marvelled at how happy she always seemed to be. Shannen saw her every morning, nodded and smiled every morning, noticed when she had washed her hair, knew what different outfits she owned, yet did not know her name. Shannen had often pondered the senseless cocoon that people routinely tried to wrap themselves in on public transport, but she did not have the time for such deep thoughts this morning - if she missed this train she would be late for work at the supermarket for the third time this week, and she would be damned if she would lose a perfectly good job because she was hanging around a train station philosophising.
Shannen brushed past the other woman as she closed the car door and locked it, and on a whim, decided to head through the long grass and up to the station, rather than going the long way around to the overpass. She knew she would be able to pick up some more speed running along the empty outbound platform than she could across the rough and broken footpath. She took two steps into the long grass, and was preparing to vault through the narrow gap beside the fence up on to the platform, when something buried in the grass caught the toe of her shoe and tangled in her ankles. Shannen cried out and fell hard on the still slightly dewy ground, and felt her knee land on a strange, unnatural bulge in the ground. Looking down, almost dreamlike, she saw a blanket lying in the grass, covered with filth and for a moment could not fathom what it might mean. Time, which had previously been racing, now slowed and seemed almost to stop, as her gaze traversed the length of the blanket-covered object and finally alighted upon a bare, pink, human toe. Shannen had time to analyse the nicely cut toe nail, the pink, sparkly polish that had started to wear along the cut edge, and finally her voice caught up to her vision, and she began to scream.
Elouise
Elouise grabbed her bag off the passenger seat, got out of the car and turned to close the door and lock it. As she did, a young brunette woman dashed past her, in an obvious hurry. Elouise checked her watch and realised the train was due any minute. She wasn't overly concerned, the only reason she took the early train was so that she could spend more time with Zach, who she knew would be waiting for her at Central, but she had no intention of raising a sweat and breaking a heel to catch it - there would another along in fifteen minutes, and she certainly did not want to look a wreck for Zach.
Humming tuneless nonsense to herself, she turned away from the dashing woman, locked the car, and began to walk up the footpath that led to the pedestrian overpass. She was in too good a mood to worry about the broken pieces in the concrete, simply stepping over the potholes, taking the opportunity to admire her new shoes as she did so. They were a grey fabric, with lovely black patent toes and a ridiculously high heel. She had spent way too much money on them, imagining what Zach might think of her purchase as she handed over the credit card that was in her husband's name. Rob had not noticed that she had new shoes, but then she had not expected him to.
Eloise was just completing her crossing of the overpass as the train came to a clanking, brake-squealing, shuddering halt beneath her. She quickly trotted down the steps on the other side, thankful that she had a ten trip ticket that had not yet expired, and boarded the train just as the guard's whistle blew. She did not see Shannen fall in the grass on the opposite side of the platform, and she did not hear the scream that pierced the Monday morning of a working week that was going to be far from ordinary.
Zach
Zachary waited at Central at the farthest end of Platform Eight. Elouise was due to arrive in less than three minutes, and suddenly Zach felt nervous. He had trouble pinpointing the source of this nervousness, and after a minute or so of reasonably shallow searching - Zach made it a point not to ever delve too deeply into his emotions - he eventually blamed it on an underlying sense of ever present guilt. He had been seeing Elouise for about three years now, they met right here at the end of Platform Eight five mornings a week, and in that time Zach felt he had learnt just about all there was to learn about Elouise. She was attractive, and about ten years younger than him, which made her instantly eligible in Zach's eyes, but he had started to feel the affair fade in the past few months and he was in two minds about what to do about it. Zach knew he was not the kind of man to settle down, let's face it, he'd been single for 43 years, he wasn't about to change his habits now, and the relationship with Elouise had started to sink into a routine. They met in the early hours at the station, they drove round to his studio in Frank street, they fucked, then he drove her to work. Not that he was complaining about the sex, even bad sex in Zach's book was still worth having, but he was bored. He knew what she liked, she knew what he liked, and the fun and spontaneity had winked out like a light bulb at the end of its life. If Zach and Elouise had have been married, or in an open, less clandestine relationship, he thought he would probably put in the effort and try and revive the sexual energy that had existed between them for so long. But he was tired, he was bored, and he simply did not feel that Elouise was worth it. She was getting older, her looks would start to fade before too much longer, and he made a point never to hang around that long. What had once been exciting, passionate and somehow dirty and erotic, had now become routine, boring and joyless. He had to end it.
The train pulled into the station, a minute late, and Zach watched as people poured off the last carriage. Elouise was not one of them. Zach gave an involuntary sigh of relief and rose to leave, thinking that he would go online later on and catch her at work, that she would explain how she missed the train, that she was devastated he hadn't waited. He would apologise, bring her flowers tomorrow, and then do the deed that he had been putting off for so long. Zach had taken just one step toward the exit when he was nearly bowled over by Elouise at a full run.
"Oh, Zach, baby! There you are! I almost missed the train, had to get on at the other end. Oh, I'm so glad I caught you!" Elouise's words came out in a breathless rush, the last sentence spoken directly into Zach's shoulder as they embraced.
"Baby doll ... Elly! Settle down, I can feel your heart racing." he pulled her away from his chest, looked her up and down appraisingly, taking in her heaving chest and the red flush that crept from her neck and down into her cleavage. He opened his mouth to give her the bad news, but at the last moment noticed the swelling in his trousers. Ah, what the hell, he thought, one more day wouldn't hurt, "Come on Babe, let's go, huh?"
Elouise grinned, nodded and stuck one toe out in front her, "What do you think, Baby?"
Zach swallowed a groan, plastered a smile on his face, and started to lead her out of the train station, "I love them! Did you get them on the weekend?"
Monday - 4:56am to the City
Dalton
It was early, the sun had only barely crept above the horizon and the usually hot November air still had a chill lingering at the edges, although that would not last much longer. Dalton tramped steadily around the bend in the road approaching the train station, his Styrofoam lunchbox swinging loosely from his hand, hitting him in the knee on every second swing, and his safety orange shirt the only spot of brightness in the otherwise overcast morning. Dalton liked his job, he enjoyed being outdoors all day, even in the variety of harsh summer sun that only Queensland seemed able to produce. He enjoyed working with his hands, building things that were sturdy and functional, and for the most part he got along well with his workmates. In fact, the only thing he didn't like about his job was the early starts. He had always been a late riser, even while he was still in nappies, and despite over fifteen years of working in the building industry, he had never been able to train his body to rise in the darkness. He had resigned himself to it, and the early finishes went some way to repairing the damage, but he looked forward to a day when he could sleep in every day, for as long as he wanted. Dalton - known as Tony to his mates - was 33, and counting down the days until he could retire and get some hard-earned rest.
The train station gradually hove into view around the bend and Dalton, with nothing better to study as he walked, stared lazily across at the opposite platform. As was normal just before the 4:56 into the city, there appeared to be no one in sight. The ticket booth wouldn't open for another hour and a half yet, and the commuters didn't arrive in earnest until after seven normally. Dalton felt a brief stab of jealousy - the joy of being able to get up at half-past six and meander slowly down to the station for the 7:44! This passed quickly, as he realised that these commuters may have great working hours, but they had to sit behind a desk and push paper and red tape all day for the privilege. Comforted slightly, he reached the staircase that led over the train line, and started to climb.
As Dalton climbed the stairs, a sudden movement at the far end of the platform caught his eye and he whipped his head around to investigate. Unaccustomed to having company on his early forays to the station, his heart leaped into his mouth when he spotted a dark, hunched over creature shuffling towards the farthest bench on the outward bound platform. Upon closer inspection, it appeared to be an elderly gent with a hat and a mostly empty-looking black plastic garbage bag. Dalton gave himself a sharp mental rebuke for getting startled over a homeless man, but continued to survey the platform to put his mind at ease. He could see the general detritus left over from a weekend typically full of teenagers with nothing better to do - some empty beer and spirits bottles thrown around and some fresh graffiti on the walls of the shelter. Otherwise, nothing appeared out of the ordinary except for a bundle of what appeared to be old clothes, or maybe a blanket, just outside the fence line, where the station ended and the long paspalum grass delimited the edge of the public car park. The old man had trundled to his seat from that direction, and Dalton assumed it was where he had spent the night. As if hearing Dalton's thoughts, the old man suddenly looked up and stared back at him. Dalton averted his eyes out of shame and pity, and continued over to the other platform.
Dalton purchased a weekly ticket from the vending machine kindly provided by City Rail and thankfully working for a change, and found a place to sit at the far end of the platform, as far from the homeless man as he could. Trying to be casual, he laid back on the uncomfortable seat and pondered why anyone - homeless or otherwise - would choose to try and sleep on one. They appeared designed specifically to discourage people from spending any time on them. He could understand why the old man would sleep on a blanket in the grass instead. Dalton checked his watch - only 3 minutes to spare - half closed his eyes, and waited for his train, enjoying the warmth of the early morning sun on his upturned face.
Walter
Walter didn't normally come out to the station on a Monday. He liked to come out on Sundays, mostly because there were less people around, and he could just watch the trains without having anyone call the police. Walter had lived on the railway line since he was born and had wanted to be a train driver for as long as he could remember. When he was 14 he took on odd jobs at the railway station near his house and, joy of joys, had finally become a driver at 26. He offered forty-five years of loyal service to City Railways as a driver, and was eventually forced into retirement against his wishes. Then two years ago, when his wife fell into a diabetic coma that she never woke up from, Walter had begun spending more and more time at the station, watching and photographing the trains that had formed such a large part of his life. Now, at 73, Walter had become a more or less permanent fixture at Redton station, although he came at irregular enough times and faded into the background enough that the commuter population rarely saw him, although he was well known to the station staff. The older staffers knew Walter from his days as a driver, and one guy regularly sat down and reminisced, although Walter suspected it was more out of pity than friendship. The younger, newer ones rarely spoke to him at all, although they appeared to recognise him and left him to his train spotting without interfering. The grand majority of Walter's problems came from the general public, since that horrible business in America a few years ago people saw an old man loitering around public transport and taking photographs they assumed they were going to fall victim to the next terrorist attack. As a result, Walter had also become reasonably well known to the local police officers, who still occasionally came out to check things over, but mostly just reassured the hysterical public citizen over the phone that Yes, Ma'am, they knew who he was, and they also knew that he was totally, utterly harmless.
Yesterday morning Walter had fully woken from his usually disturbed sleep at 3am, intending to head down to the station while it was still nice and quiet, and watch the sun rise over the train line. When he had gone to swing his legs over the edge of the bed, sharp-edged pain had gripped his right hip and with a cry he had fallen back to bed. After some time of repositioning his worn body, he gingerly managed to get out bed and stumble to the bathroom to find some pain killers. He swallowed a few of the stronger variety, then shuffled back to bed, allowing the drugs to take over. By the time the analgesics had taken their blessed, longed-for effect and Walter felt well enough to rise again, it was almost lunch time. By painful experience, Walter knew that all those who had been shopping in the city on their day off would be returning throughout the afternoon, and there would be no helpful staff member to calm any panicked member of the public. He chose to spend the rest of the day not looking at the real ones, but watching the miniature variety in his lounge room instead. They were a poor substitute, but would serve to while away an otherwise lonely and boring afternoon.
So it happened that Walter was at the station on Monday morning not long after dawn, which today had broken just after half past four. His right hip still ached, and the short walk from his bedsit up the road to the station was painful, but he knew it would be worthwhile once he got there. He clutched a black plastic garbage bag in his right fist which contained his camera, a notebook, and his reference book – “Australian Trains Past and Present: A Pictorial History”. He clamped his fingers tighter around the top of the bag with every bolt of pain from his hip, willing himself to just take another step, take another step, keep walking, don't fall.
With the pain in his hip now extending across his back and down his right leg, and his vision starting to grey at the edges, Walter finally stepped into the railway car park, preparing to take the few steps through the long grass then slip through the break in the fence to the end of the platform. Focused as he was on the pain in his side and back, and the simple act of just making it to the bench on the station, and compounded by the overcast morning, he didn't see the bundle hidden in the grass until he stepped on the hem of the blanket covering it. At first he just thought it was just a bunch of old clothes, left behind by the hoodlums who had no doubt been around the station over the weekend. But then he realised that, for a bunch of old clothes, it was surprisingly person-shaped. Not wanting to touch it, but curiosity getting the better of him, he shifted his weight carefully to the left side, and used his right foot to give the bundle a gentle nudge. His bad hip gave an almost audible shriek of protest and he pulled his foot away before managing to move the blanket at all. Suddenly, his long-gone wife spoke up in his ear, saying Leave well enough alone, Walt. See no evil, remember? With the sudden realisation that he might be meddling in something that he certainly did not belong in, he turned away, and fell into a stumbling half run up to the platform.
Visibly shaking, and with the pain in his hip now all but forgotten, Walter staggered up the incline through the waist high paspalum grass, scrambled up onto the concrete of the platform, and fell onto the bench. He leaned forward, putting his head between his knees, and counted haltingly to ten, then twenty. With his heart rate only slightly lowered, an ache in his chest and burning fire throughout his entire lower body, he raised his head slowly and saw a man in a bright orange shirt watching him from the pedestrian overpass. Walter opened his mouth to speak, to bring this stranger into his confidence and share the burden of what Walter could only assume was a horrid, grisly discovery, and found that he couldn't form the words. What could he possibly say, that would not make this man turn tail and run? Defeated by his own inability to form the sentence that would make this man trust him, Walter slowly lowered his head again. This time he counted to one hundred.
It was early, the sun had only barely crept above the horizon and the usually hot November air still had a chill lingering at the edges, although that would not last much longer. Dalton tramped steadily around the bend in the road approaching the train station, his Styrofoam lunchbox swinging loosely from his hand, hitting him in the knee on every second swing, and his safety orange shirt the only spot of brightness in the otherwise overcast morning. Dalton liked his job, he enjoyed being outdoors all day, even in the variety of harsh summer sun that only Queensland seemed able to produce. He enjoyed working with his hands, building things that were sturdy and functional, and for the most part he got along well with his workmates. In fact, the only thing he didn't like about his job was the early starts. He had always been a late riser, even while he was still in nappies, and despite over fifteen years of working in the building industry, he had never been able to train his body to rise in the darkness. He had resigned himself to it, and the early finishes went some way to repairing the damage, but he looked forward to a day when he could sleep in every day, for as long as he wanted. Dalton - known as Tony to his mates - was 33, and counting down the days until he could retire and get some hard-earned rest.
The train station gradually hove into view around the bend and Dalton, with nothing better to study as he walked, stared lazily across at the opposite platform. As was normal just before the 4:56 into the city, there appeared to be no one in sight. The ticket booth wouldn't open for another hour and a half yet, and the commuters didn't arrive in earnest until after seven normally. Dalton felt a brief stab of jealousy - the joy of being able to get up at half-past six and meander slowly down to the station for the 7:44! This passed quickly, as he realised that these commuters may have great working hours, but they had to sit behind a desk and push paper and red tape all day for the privilege. Comforted slightly, he reached the staircase that led over the train line, and started to climb.
As Dalton climbed the stairs, a sudden movement at the far end of the platform caught his eye and he whipped his head around to investigate. Unaccustomed to having company on his early forays to the station, his heart leaped into his mouth when he spotted a dark, hunched over creature shuffling towards the farthest bench on the outward bound platform. Upon closer inspection, it appeared to be an elderly gent with a hat and a mostly empty-looking black plastic garbage bag. Dalton gave himself a sharp mental rebuke for getting startled over a homeless man, but continued to survey the platform to put his mind at ease. He could see the general detritus left over from a weekend typically full of teenagers with nothing better to do - some empty beer and spirits bottles thrown around and some fresh graffiti on the walls of the shelter. Otherwise, nothing appeared out of the ordinary except for a bundle of what appeared to be old clothes, or maybe a blanket, just outside the fence line, where the station ended and the long paspalum grass delimited the edge of the public car park. The old man had trundled to his seat from that direction, and Dalton assumed it was where he had spent the night. As if hearing Dalton's thoughts, the old man suddenly looked up and stared back at him. Dalton averted his eyes out of shame and pity, and continued over to the other platform.
Dalton purchased a weekly ticket from the vending machine kindly provided by City Rail and thankfully working for a change, and found a place to sit at the far end of the platform, as far from the homeless man as he could. Trying to be casual, he laid back on the uncomfortable seat and pondered why anyone - homeless or otherwise - would choose to try and sleep on one. They appeared designed specifically to discourage people from spending any time on them. He could understand why the old man would sleep on a blanket in the grass instead. Dalton checked his watch - only 3 minutes to spare - half closed his eyes, and waited for his train, enjoying the warmth of the early morning sun on his upturned face.
Walter
Walter didn't normally come out to the station on a Monday. He liked to come out on Sundays, mostly because there were less people around, and he could just watch the trains without having anyone call the police. Walter had lived on the railway line since he was born and had wanted to be a train driver for as long as he could remember. When he was 14 he took on odd jobs at the railway station near his house and, joy of joys, had finally become a driver at 26. He offered forty-five years of loyal service to City Railways as a driver, and was eventually forced into retirement against his wishes. Then two years ago, when his wife fell into a diabetic coma that she never woke up from, Walter had begun spending more and more time at the station, watching and photographing the trains that had formed such a large part of his life. Now, at 73, Walter had become a more or less permanent fixture at Redton station, although he came at irregular enough times and faded into the background enough that the commuter population rarely saw him, although he was well known to the station staff. The older staffers knew Walter from his days as a driver, and one guy regularly sat down and reminisced, although Walter suspected it was more out of pity than friendship. The younger, newer ones rarely spoke to him at all, although they appeared to recognise him and left him to his train spotting without interfering. The grand majority of Walter's problems came from the general public, since that horrible business in America a few years ago people saw an old man loitering around public transport and taking photographs they assumed they were going to fall victim to the next terrorist attack. As a result, Walter had also become reasonably well known to the local police officers, who still occasionally came out to check things over, but mostly just reassured the hysterical public citizen over the phone that Yes, Ma'am, they knew who he was, and they also knew that he was totally, utterly harmless.
Yesterday morning Walter had fully woken from his usually disturbed sleep at 3am, intending to head down to the station while it was still nice and quiet, and watch the sun rise over the train line. When he had gone to swing his legs over the edge of the bed, sharp-edged pain had gripped his right hip and with a cry he had fallen back to bed. After some time of repositioning his worn body, he gingerly managed to get out bed and stumble to the bathroom to find some pain killers. He swallowed a few of the stronger variety, then shuffled back to bed, allowing the drugs to take over. By the time the analgesics had taken their blessed, longed-for effect and Walter felt well enough to rise again, it was almost lunch time. By painful experience, Walter knew that all those who had been shopping in the city on their day off would be returning throughout the afternoon, and there would be no helpful staff member to calm any panicked member of the public. He chose to spend the rest of the day not looking at the real ones, but watching the miniature variety in his lounge room instead. They were a poor substitute, but would serve to while away an otherwise lonely and boring afternoon.
So it happened that Walter was at the station on Monday morning not long after dawn, which today had broken just after half past four. His right hip still ached, and the short walk from his bedsit up the road to the station was painful, but he knew it would be worthwhile once he got there. He clutched a black plastic garbage bag in his right fist which contained his camera, a notebook, and his reference book – “Australian Trains Past and Present: A Pictorial History”. He clamped his fingers tighter around the top of the bag with every bolt of pain from his hip, willing himself to just take another step, take another step, keep walking, don't fall.
With the pain in his hip now extending across his back and down his right leg, and his vision starting to grey at the edges, Walter finally stepped into the railway car park, preparing to take the few steps through the long grass then slip through the break in the fence to the end of the platform. Focused as he was on the pain in his side and back, and the simple act of just making it to the bench on the station, and compounded by the overcast morning, he didn't see the bundle hidden in the grass until he stepped on the hem of the blanket covering it. At first he just thought it was just a bunch of old clothes, left behind by the hoodlums who had no doubt been around the station over the weekend. But then he realised that, for a bunch of old clothes, it was surprisingly person-shaped. Not wanting to touch it, but curiosity getting the better of him, he shifted his weight carefully to the left side, and used his right foot to give the bundle a gentle nudge. His bad hip gave an almost audible shriek of protest and he pulled his foot away before managing to move the blanket at all. Suddenly, his long-gone wife spoke up in his ear, saying Leave well enough alone, Walt. See no evil, remember? With the sudden realisation that he might be meddling in something that he certainly did not belong in, he turned away, and fell into a stumbling half run up to the platform.
Visibly shaking, and with the pain in his hip now all but forgotten, Walter staggered up the incline through the waist high paspalum grass, scrambled up onto the concrete of the platform, and fell onto the bench. He leaned forward, putting his head between his knees, and counted haltingly to ten, then twenty. With his heart rate only slightly lowered, an ache in his chest and burning fire throughout his entire lower body, he raised his head slowly and saw a man in a bright orange shirt watching him from the pedestrian overpass. Walter opened his mouth to speak, to bring this stranger into his confidence and share the burden of what Walter could only assume was a horrid, grisly discovery, and found that he couldn't form the words. What could he possibly say, that would not make this man turn tail and run? Defeated by his own inability to form the sentence that would make this man trust him, Walter slowly lowered his head again. This time he counted to one hundred.
Sunday Afternoon
Elouise
Elouise lay in bliss on the sun-drenched balcony, sunk down on her chair with her feet up on the railing and her eyes half closed with sleep and sun. She had a book out - a Marian Keyes - but she wasn't reading it. The book lay open flat across her chest, face down. From this perspective, all she could she of the cover was a gaudy red cartoon-smile watermelon. Elouise wasn't thinking about her book, she wasn't thinking about the lovely sun-drenched summer day, she wasn't even thinking about the barbeque dinner she had planned for that evening with some old friends. Like a love struck teenager, Elouise was thinking about the man in her life. Zach set her heart fluttering - even after all this time. He was tall, much taller than Elouise, with a solid build. The kind of guy who simply emanated strength, support and confidence - a typical Mills and Boon hero. That was where the similarity to a romance novel ended, though. While the masculine heroes in those novels were either outdoor working men or polished, educated doctors, Zach was an artist. Mostly, he painted oil on canvas, and Elouise had never confessed that his paintings made little sense to her. But also he was a poet and an astonishingly good songwriter. Zach had written her countless little poems over the years they been spent together - pressing handwritten little snippets of paper into her hand as she boarded the train. She had lost her mp3 player for an entire week once, had been just about to give in and buy another when Zach presented it to her one morning - completely filled with songs he had written and recorded just for her.
As she trawled through these glamorous, rosy memories of the moments she and Zach had spent together, Elouise smiled and reached out lazily for a drink. The ice cubes rattled in the bottom of the glass as she picked it up and as she brought it to her lips she realised that the only liquid left in the bottom was melted ice. With a regretful sigh, she left her memories on the balcony without her for a moment, put the book down on the boards beneath her chair, and rose to refill her glass.
Elouise would have described herself as 'average', were you to ask her, and were she to answer frankly. From an outside perspective though, she was disarmingly attractive. Slightly overweight, although only Elouise noticed, she was 36 with dark, slightly curly mid-length hair and olive features. She stood slightly taller than a lot of women and it was this height that allowed her to carry the extra weight - with it, she simply looked healthy and curvy, without it she would look under-nourished.
The kitchen seemed very dull and cold after the bright sun and warmth of the balcony. She automatically reached out for the light switch, before realising that her eyes would adjust soon enough and pulling her hand away. She went to the fridge, found the orange juice and poured another drink on top of the half-used ice cubes in her glass. She found fresh ice cubes and topped it up and while she was putting the tray away in the freezer her eyes found the vodka bottle she kept stashed there. She briefly considered adding a splash to the glass, but then decided to hold out until her guests arrived for dinner. She didn't want to be half drunk before they even got there, and she knew that as soon as she had one, there would be no more plain orange juice for her. She picked up the refreshed glass in one hand and headed back out to the balcony to pick up her daydreaming where she left off.
As she stepped out through the sliding door to the balcony, she heard activity in the garden below - ominous clanging and banging of the barbeque and associated paraphernalia, then the hiss of the gas bottle as it was connected. She heard the pilot light ignition click once, twice, three times but didn't hear the whoosh as the gas caught. More clicking, still no luck by the sounds of things. Now fully shaken out of her lovely romantic day dreams, she walked over to the railing instead of sitting back down, hanging right over to see into the garden below. As she did, the man tending the barbeque looked up at her and smiled sheepishly, "Hey El, there you are! It seems as though we're out of barbeque gas. Would you mind running down to the petrol station and getting another, Hun?"
Eloise sighed, put the drink down, and straightened slightly, fixing her husband with a steely glare. "How many times this week have I asked you to check that thing, Robert? I hope you have some cash in your wallet."
Her good mood totally dashed, and thoughts of Zach now horribly far away, Eloise stamped back through the house, grabbed her handbag, and got into the car to get a gas bottle.
Megan
Megan stood slowly, pressed her hands into the small of her back and stretched her protesting spine backwards and her belly upwards, counteracting the weight of the baby, then laughed at the typical 'pregnant woman' pose she was doing and relaxed with a smile. She glanced over at her husband on the lounge, but Dalton appeared to be asleep in front of the cricket. He had been giving her a gentle ribbing recently about her waddling, she could only imagine what he would say about the back stretching she had just been doing. With the baby due in only a few weeks, she was finding the physical aspect increasingly hard to deal with.
Chuckling softly to herself, she turned back to the work she had been doing on the kitchen table, readjusting the cushion on the hard kitchen chair as she carefully sat back down. The work surface was covered in tiny baby-related paper cut-outs and Megan was busily pasting them onto an album page, ready for the moment that they had some real baby photos to add to it. At the moment she had a few blurry ultrasound photos that looked more like blobby bits of custard swimming in a dark night ocean, but they were proof of the fact that there was, indeed a baby, so they were going in.
Megan was 32, only a year a husband's junior, and the baby she had been carrying for just over thirty-seven weeks was her third pregnancy. They had suffered through two miscarriages in the past four years, deciding after she lost the second at only twelve weeks that they weren't going to keep on trying, the emotional strain and physical damage was starting to take its toll. Then, late last February she had missed a period and, terrified of losing yet another baby, they had kept the news quiet until late in May, when the swelling under her tee shirt could no longer be easily concealed. She had been confined to bed rest and, as a result, had quit her job as a medical secretary. Finding herself with a pregnancy stretching ahead of her with nothing to do but watch daytime television, she had taken up all manner of hobbies - crochet, tatting, cross-stitch, watercolours and glass etching had all had a run, now she was stuck on scrapbooking. She sat with her head bowed over the oddments of paper and ribbon, her dark hair cut in a bob scraped her chin as it hung, and she pushed it back with the heel of a hand still pinching a paper cut-out of an old-fashioned style baby carriage.
Engrossed as she was in the album page in front of her, she didn't notice her husband standing behind her until he kissed her in the bare spot behind her ear. She jumped, a neatly sorted pile of ribbon snippets flying off the table in every direction, and Dalton grabbed her by the shoulders, "I'm sorry!" he squawked, "I didn't mean to frighten you! Are you okay, sweetie?" the nervous edge to his voice had been there since they found out she was pregnant again, nerves borne of so many prior disappointments. She smiled sweetly to reassure him, and as she stood to face him the hangdog look on his face made her throw her arms around his neck, the baby between them in an embrace. To prove that he or she was still there the baby gave Dalton a good kick, and he bent to kiss Megan's belly. Megan poked the baby gently, "Oi you!" she said, still laughing, "Settle down in there! You need to wait a little while longer, I'm not ready to work out how to get you out of there yet!"
Lawrence
Lawrence had had his eyes on Ariana since he first set eyes on her at the party on Saturday night. So far, he thought it was going pretty well too. He had thought that she had been impressed by his degree - a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Law that he invariably told people was a "Law Degree". He had finished midway through last year and graduated in September, and he considered it the most amazing achievement of his life so far. As such, it ranked highly in his conversation with Ariana. What hadn't featured quite so highly in the conversation was the fact that he had just started a new a job in the city - as a dogsbody for a personal assistant. How embarrassing. At least he got to wear a suit to work, anyway. And at least it was in the city. This way he could at least spend the train ride to and from work every day, holding his briefcase which contained nothing more than a sandwich, an apple and a broken ballpoint pen, imagining that he had a high-powered and very stressful executive position on the board of directors. What Lawrence didn't realise was that, even though this little fantasy played out well in his head, to the others that shared his commute, he was still a 22 year old kid with a cheap suit and a cardboard briefcase. Nevertheless, and never one to let the truth get in the way of a good fantasy involving power and riches, he maintained the dream for as long as he could, and tried to portray this character to his new found friends, Ariana included.
Lying on a bean bag in a corner of his mate Ben's living room, Lawrence surveyed the clutter and detritus that surrounded him. The television was on, blaring a music video DVD to the room at large. The cheap speakers in the discount-brand widescreen television had come to the end of their life approximately two months after purchase, and now spouted a terrible crackling and hissing version of growled and snarled lyrics to what should have been a familiar tune. It didn't matter too much, no-one was paying any attention to the aural abomination. However, the room was far from empty - at least four bodies lay around the floor and couch, in varying degrees of alertness. Ben, the ever-gracious host of the party last night, dominated the couch - head back, mouth open, legs and arms thrown wide - snoring loudly, but not loud enough to drown out the music from the television, unfortunately. Two other men were passed out in the room, one on the recliner and a second on the carpet, neither of whom Lawrence recognised, although he vaguely remembered having a very in-depth conversation with the guy who now seemed passed out on the rug with his hand still in a bowl of nuts. What were they discussing, he wondered, and eventually recalled it had something to do with the possibility of intelligent life landing on Earth and blowing up Microsoft. Lawrence heaved a sigh and hoped he was mistaken in that recollection. As for the fourth body, from Lawrence's position he couldn't see anyone, but he could hear snoring from behind him somewhere, forming a tenor counterpoint to Ben's bass.
The other person Lawrence couldn't see was Ariana. He mentally kicked himself for drinking way too much last night. If he hadn't had the last five or so bourbon and cokes, he would have been able to get her into bed, he was sure of it. Ariana was beautiful - long, pitch-black hair straight down her back, and a pair of the loveliest breasts. Lawrence tried to remember what she's been wearing last night, hoping to catch a glimpse of her through the door into the kitchen, but he struggled and couldn't recall. He had spent a large amount of time looking down her cleavage, but he would be damned if he could remember what it had been wrapped in. Damn shame about those last few bourbons, taking Ariana to bed would have given him bragging rights to his mates for weeks. Months, even, maybe.
Slowly, and with the variety of sluggishness only an A-grade hangover can provide, Lawrence performed a personal physical inventory. He still appeared to be in possession of all his major appendages. He didn't dare try to move them any more than a few centimetres, but upon inspection they all seemed to behave in an appropriately correct manner. He didn't seem to have any sticky patches that couldn't be explained away by alcohol, so he figured that he hadn't, despite his best intention, gotten anyone (Ariana included) into bed. This was a minor disappointment, but one that he was pitifully accustomed to. Lawrence turned his head slightly to see if his neck was working properly, and a light-sabre of sun sliced through the venetian blinds and hit him square between the eyes. He closed them and instinctively reached to his head for his sunglasses. They weren't there - damn it. Normally a permanent fixture day or night, he must have lost them off his head when he collapsed on to the bean bag. He carefully weighed his options - he could sit here with his eyes shut and wait for the light to fade, which could possibly take hours as he had no idea what time of the day it was and whether this was morning or afternoon sun; or could haul his sorry ass out of the bean bag and go looking for his sunglasses. After careful deliberation and a small alcohol-induced slumber, he decided, however foolishly, to try and extricate himself from the clutches of the bean bag.
He started by rolling to one side, hoping to roll right out. The bean bag was obstinate however, and held on firmly, refusing to tip him out on to the floor. Lawrence was nothing if not persistent though and rolled the other way, at which point the bean bag decided to give up - suddenly and reasonably unexpectedly, at least to Lawrence's alcohol-addled mind. He landed, splat, on the carpeted floor, finding his nose in a suspiciously sticky patch on the carpet, and his shoulder hard up against the foot of the couch. His left leg appeared to have taken up residence under the coffee table. If it wasn't for this unfortunate series of events, Lawrence may have decided to remain there until more of his hangover had passed, but the stench from the carpet was enough to make even Lawrence move and, very carefully, he rose to his feet.
Once the room had ceased the most wild of the careening it was currently undertaking, Lawrence stepped gingerly over to the blaring television and punched random buttons through blurry eyes until the noise mercifully ceased. He watched with interest as the picture faded to a single pinpoint of light and winked out, and revelled in the silence that can fall only after a DVD that has been on constant repeat for close to ten hours has been silenced. With this problem solved neatly, Lawrence dug around the bean bag for his sunglasses, finally finding them, bent and with a lens missing, He stared at them, deliberating, and then decided to put them on anyway. Something was better than nothing, right?
Elouise lay in bliss on the sun-drenched balcony, sunk down on her chair with her feet up on the railing and her eyes half closed with sleep and sun. She had a book out - a Marian Keyes - but she wasn't reading it. The book lay open flat across her chest, face down. From this perspective, all she could she of the cover was a gaudy red cartoon-smile watermelon. Elouise wasn't thinking about her book, she wasn't thinking about the lovely sun-drenched summer day, she wasn't even thinking about the barbeque dinner she had planned for that evening with some old friends. Like a love struck teenager, Elouise was thinking about the man in her life. Zach set her heart fluttering - even after all this time. He was tall, much taller than Elouise, with a solid build. The kind of guy who simply emanated strength, support and confidence - a typical Mills and Boon hero. That was where the similarity to a romance novel ended, though. While the masculine heroes in those novels were either outdoor working men or polished, educated doctors, Zach was an artist. Mostly, he painted oil on canvas, and Elouise had never confessed that his paintings made little sense to her. But also he was a poet and an astonishingly good songwriter. Zach had written her countless little poems over the years they been spent together - pressing handwritten little snippets of paper into her hand as she boarded the train. She had lost her mp3 player for an entire week once, had been just about to give in and buy another when Zach presented it to her one morning - completely filled with songs he had written and recorded just for her.
As she trawled through these glamorous, rosy memories of the moments she and Zach had spent together, Elouise smiled and reached out lazily for a drink. The ice cubes rattled in the bottom of the glass as she picked it up and as she brought it to her lips she realised that the only liquid left in the bottom was melted ice. With a regretful sigh, she left her memories on the balcony without her for a moment, put the book down on the boards beneath her chair, and rose to refill her glass.
Elouise would have described herself as 'average', were you to ask her, and were she to answer frankly. From an outside perspective though, she was disarmingly attractive. Slightly overweight, although only Elouise noticed, she was 36 with dark, slightly curly mid-length hair and olive features. She stood slightly taller than a lot of women and it was this height that allowed her to carry the extra weight - with it, she simply looked healthy and curvy, without it she would look under-nourished.
The kitchen seemed very dull and cold after the bright sun and warmth of the balcony. She automatically reached out for the light switch, before realising that her eyes would adjust soon enough and pulling her hand away. She went to the fridge, found the orange juice and poured another drink on top of the half-used ice cubes in her glass. She found fresh ice cubes and topped it up and while she was putting the tray away in the freezer her eyes found the vodka bottle she kept stashed there. She briefly considered adding a splash to the glass, but then decided to hold out until her guests arrived for dinner. She didn't want to be half drunk before they even got there, and she knew that as soon as she had one, there would be no more plain orange juice for her. She picked up the refreshed glass in one hand and headed back out to the balcony to pick up her daydreaming where she left off.
As she stepped out through the sliding door to the balcony, she heard activity in the garden below - ominous clanging and banging of the barbeque and associated paraphernalia, then the hiss of the gas bottle as it was connected. She heard the pilot light ignition click once, twice, three times but didn't hear the whoosh as the gas caught. More clicking, still no luck by the sounds of things. Now fully shaken out of her lovely romantic day dreams, she walked over to the railing instead of sitting back down, hanging right over to see into the garden below. As she did, the man tending the barbeque looked up at her and smiled sheepishly, "Hey El, there you are! It seems as though we're out of barbeque gas. Would you mind running down to the petrol station and getting another, Hun?"
Eloise sighed, put the drink down, and straightened slightly, fixing her husband with a steely glare. "How many times this week have I asked you to check that thing, Robert? I hope you have some cash in your wallet."
Her good mood totally dashed, and thoughts of Zach now horribly far away, Eloise stamped back through the house, grabbed her handbag, and got into the car to get a gas bottle.
Megan
Megan stood slowly, pressed her hands into the small of her back and stretched her protesting spine backwards and her belly upwards, counteracting the weight of the baby, then laughed at the typical 'pregnant woman' pose she was doing and relaxed with a smile. She glanced over at her husband on the lounge, but Dalton appeared to be asleep in front of the cricket. He had been giving her a gentle ribbing recently about her waddling, she could only imagine what he would say about the back stretching she had just been doing. With the baby due in only a few weeks, she was finding the physical aspect increasingly hard to deal with.
Chuckling softly to herself, she turned back to the work she had been doing on the kitchen table, readjusting the cushion on the hard kitchen chair as she carefully sat back down. The work surface was covered in tiny baby-related paper cut-outs and Megan was busily pasting them onto an album page, ready for the moment that they had some real baby photos to add to it. At the moment she had a few blurry ultrasound photos that looked more like blobby bits of custard swimming in a dark night ocean, but they were proof of the fact that there was, indeed a baby, so they were going in.
Megan was 32, only a year a husband's junior, and the baby she had been carrying for just over thirty-seven weeks was her third pregnancy. They had suffered through two miscarriages in the past four years, deciding after she lost the second at only twelve weeks that they weren't going to keep on trying, the emotional strain and physical damage was starting to take its toll. Then, late last February she had missed a period and, terrified of losing yet another baby, they had kept the news quiet until late in May, when the swelling under her tee shirt could no longer be easily concealed. She had been confined to bed rest and, as a result, had quit her job as a medical secretary. Finding herself with a pregnancy stretching ahead of her with nothing to do but watch daytime television, she had taken up all manner of hobbies - crochet, tatting, cross-stitch, watercolours and glass etching had all had a run, now she was stuck on scrapbooking. She sat with her head bowed over the oddments of paper and ribbon, her dark hair cut in a bob scraped her chin as it hung, and she pushed it back with the heel of a hand still pinching a paper cut-out of an old-fashioned style baby carriage.
Engrossed as she was in the album page in front of her, she didn't notice her husband standing behind her until he kissed her in the bare spot behind her ear. She jumped, a neatly sorted pile of ribbon snippets flying off the table in every direction, and Dalton grabbed her by the shoulders, "I'm sorry!" he squawked, "I didn't mean to frighten you! Are you okay, sweetie?" the nervous edge to his voice had been there since they found out she was pregnant again, nerves borne of so many prior disappointments. She smiled sweetly to reassure him, and as she stood to face him the hangdog look on his face made her throw her arms around his neck, the baby between them in an embrace. To prove that he or she was still there the baby gave Dalton a good kick, and he bent to kiss Megan's belly. Megan poked the baby gently, "Oi you!" she said, still laughing, "Settle down in there! You need to wait a little while longer, I'm not ready to work out how to get you out of there yet!"
Lawrence
Lawrence had had his eyes on Ariana since he first set eyes on her at the party on Saturday night. So far, he thought it was going pretty well too. He had thought that she had been impressed by his degree - a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Law that he invariably told people was a "Law Degree". He had finished midway through last year and graduated in September, and he considered it the most amazing achievement of his life so far. As such, it ranked highly in his conversation with Ariana. What hadn't featured quite so highly in the conversation was the fact that he had just started a new a job in the city - as a dogsbody for a personal assistant. How embarrassing. At least he got to wear a suit to work, anyway. And at least it was in the city. This way he could at least spend the train ride to and from work every day, holding his briefcase which contained nothing more than a sandwich, an apple and a broken ballpoint pen, imagining that he had a high-powered and very stressful executive position on the board of directors. What Lawrence didn't realise was that, even though this little fantasy played out well in his head, to the others that shared his commute, he was still a 22 year old kid with a cheap suit and a cardboard briefcase. Nevertheless, and never one to let the truth get in the way of a good fantasy involving power and riches, he maintained the dream for as long as he could, and tried to portray this character to his new found friends, Ariana included.
Lying on a bean bag in a corner of his mate Ben's living room, Lawrence surveyed the clutter and detritus that surrounded him. The television was on, blaring a music video DVD to the room at large. The cheap speakers in the discount-brand widescreen television had come to the end of their life approximately two months after purchase, and now spouted a terrible crackling and hissing version of growled and snarled lyrics to what should have been a familiar tune. It didn't matter too much, no-one was paying any attention to the aural abomination. However, the room was far from empty - at least four bodies lay around the floor and couch, in varying degrees of alertness. Ben, the ever-gracious host of the party last night, dominated the couch - head back, mouth open, legs and arms thrown wide - snoring loudly, but not loud enough to drown out the music from the television, unfortunately. Two other men were passed out in the room, one on the recliner and a second on the carpet, neither of whom Lawrence recognised, although he vaguely remembered having a very in-depth conversation with the guy who now seemed passed out on the rug with his hand still in a bowl of nuts. What were they discussing, he wondered, and eventually recalled it had something to do with the possibility of intelligent life landing on Earth and blowing up Microsoft. Lawrence heaved a sigh and hoped he was mistaken in that recollection. As for the fourth body, from Lawrence's position he couldn't see anyone, but he could hear snoring from behind him somewhere, forming a tenor counterpoint to Ben's bass.
The other person Lawrence couldn't see was Ariana. He mentally kicked himself for drinking way too much last night. If he hadn't had the last five or so bourbon and cokes, he would have been able to get her into bed, he was sure of it. Ariana was beautiful - long, pitch-black hair straight down her back, and a pair of the loveliest breasts. Lawrence tried to remember what she's been wearing last night, hoping to catch a glimpse of her through the door into the kitchen, but he struggled and couldn't recall. He had spent a large amount of time looking down her cleavage, but he would be damned if he could remember what it had been wrapped in. Damn shame about those last few bourbons, taking Ariana to bed would have given him bragging rights to his mates for weeks. Months, even, maybe.
Slowly, and with the variety of sluggishness only an A-grade hangover can provide, Lawrence performed a personal physical inventory. He still appeared to be in possession of all his major appendages. He didn't dare try to move them any more than a few centimetres, but upon inspection they all seemed to behave in an appropriately correct manner. He didn't seem to have any sticky patches that couldn't be explained away by alcohol, so he figured that he hadn't, despite his best intention, gotten anyone (Ariana included) into bed. This was a minor disappointment, but one that he was pitifully accustomed to. Lawrence turned his head slightly to see if his neck was working properly, and a light-sabre of sun sliced through the venetian blinds and hit him square between the eyes. He closed them and instinctively reached to his head for his sunglasses. They weren't there - damn it. Normally a permanent fixture day or night, he must have lost them off his head when he collapsed on to the bean bag. He carefully weighed his options - he could sit here with his eyes shut and wait for the light to fade, which could possibly take hours as he had no idea what time of the day it was and whether this was morning or afternoon sun; or could haul his sorry ass out of the bean bag and go looking for his sunglasses. After careful deliberation and a small alcohol-induced slumber, he decided, however foolishly, to try and extricate himself from the clutches of the bean bag.
He started by rolling to one side, hoping to roll right out. The bean bag was obstinate however, and held on firmly, refusing to tip him out on to the floor. Lawrence was nothing if not persistent though and rolled the other way, at which point the bean bag decided to give up - suddenly and reasonably unexpectedly, at least to Lawrence's alcohol-addled mind. He landed, splat, on the carpeted floor, finding his nose in a suspiciously sticky patch on the carpet, and his shoulder hard up against the foot of the couch. His left leg appeared to have taken up residence under the coffee table. If it wasn't for this unfortunate series of events, Lawrence may have decided to remain there until more of his hangover had passed, but the stench from the carpet was enough to make even Lawrence move and, very carefully, he rose to his feet.
Once the room had ceased the most wild of the careening it was currently undertaking, Lawrence stepped gingerly over to the blaring television and punched random buttons through blurry eyes until the noise mercifully ceased. He watched with interest as the picture faded to a single pinpoint of light and winked out, and revelled in the silence that can fall only after a DVD that has been on constant repeat for close to ten hours has been silenced. With this problem solved neatly, Lawrence dug around the bean bag for his sunglasses, finally finding them, bent and with a lens missing, He stared at them, deliberating, and then decided to put them on anyway. Something was better than nothing, right?
Prologue
A figure shimmered slightly in the fog, and eventually coalesced into the shape of a man - a darker shadow in the pre-dawn dark. He was traipsing through the dense early morning fog, the night darker now than it had been when he set out. The moon had sunk below the horizon and the sun was yet to show its face. It had been a long walk from Redton station and he was unaccustomed to extended periods of exercise - the breath misting in front of his mouth and nose came quickly - but he had been reluctant to take the train for fear of being noticed and remembered. The figure approached the house slowly but eventually, feet crunching loudly in the silence, he arrived at the side gate. He slipped a practised hand through the hole in the worn boards and flicked the catch, releasing the gate to swing inwards, scraping along the loose gravel. The gate hadn't been used in a while and the figure had to push hard to exert his will against it. There was no dog, and the man entered the backyard unchallenged. He stepped through, pushed the protesting gate back home, the catch sliding closed of its own accord, and walked around to the back door. There was a covered porch area at the back of the house and to the side of the pavers lay a garden hose. The hose lay in a messy coil below the tap, still affixed at one end. The man groped in the darkness, stumbling slightly on a loop of hose and, using his hands as his only form of sight, removed the hose from the tap by pulling sharply on the plastic connecting piece. He dropped the hose end and ran the tap, the water whistling through the pipe and spurting out in a gush, splattering his shoes. He paid the mess no mind, and quickly rinsed his hands under the cold water. He pushed both his hands in the water, up to the elbow, and gave them each a soapless wash with the opposite hand. He then raised his wet hands to his face and accorded it the same treatment. The cold water was a shock to his warm face, sweaty from the exertion, but it felt good to be clean.
The man twisted the tap and shut off the flow of water, shook his arms to remove the excess, and squelched in his wet runners over to the back door. He took off his shoes and socks and, realising as he did so that his tracksuit pants were drenched almost to the knees, slipped them off too. Standing in his boxers and a grotty tee shirt, he reached out to the screen door and tried the handle. Smiling as it slid open easily and revealed the darkened laundry, he stepped into the house, dumped the dirty and wet clothes into the laundry tub, and padded quietly into the main bedroom.
The man twisted the tap and shut off the flow of water, shook his arms to remove the excess, and squelched in his wet runners over to the back door. He took off his shoes and socks and, realising as he did so that his tracksuit pants were drenched almost to the knees, slipped them off too. Standing in his boxers and a grotty tee shirt, he reached out to the screen door and tried the handle. Smiling as it slid open easily and revealed the darkened laundry, he stepped into the house, dumped the dirty and wet clothes into the laundry tub, and padded quietly into the main bedroom.
Generation Gaps
Whenever the talk turns to Gen X, Gen Y and the Baby Boomer generation, it is interesting to see how people classify others, especially when they don't know a person's birth-year, or are only aquainted through work. The reason I say this is because, like my parents, I'm an 'in-betweener'. My parents were both born in 1959, which puts them right at the tail end of the Baby Boomers. I was born in 1980, which is generally considered the year that Gen X became Gen Y. My brother, born in 1988 (and Happy Birthday Hugh!), is quite definately a Gen Y - he grew up with computers and internet access in primary school. I quite possibly could be a Gen Y, but not only was I just a fraction too old, I grew up in the country which limited our access to technology. We had a Commodore 64 and an Apple IIe in primary school (and had never heard of the internet, even though it certainly existed). In high school, we had a computer lab and some kind of rudimentary access which was very closely monitored. I got excited about programming in BASIC, but other than that I was a lot more interested in boys, the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and, er, boys, I guess. I discovered the internet in university (the person responsible for that knows who he is!) and had my eyes opened to the wonderful world of IRC at the tender age of 17. So it is for this reason that I consider myself a Gen X.
Why all this talk about Gen X and Gen Y? Well, while I was overseas recently I was surfing the interwebs to kill some time in the hotel and came across a reference to a book titled "Consuming Innocence" by Karen Brooks. In addition to being a columnist with the Courier Mail, Brooks is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at the Southern Cross University in Lismore. The book is about
Despite the marketing language on the back cover (and faithfully reproduced above by your host), which should have warned me off immediately, the book is a fascinating read. So far, I have to recommend that any parent of young children read it, especially as it is aimed specifically for an Australian geographic.
The bit that got me thinking about generation gaps, though, was Chapter Nine - "Give Me Some MySpace: The Cyberlution of Social Networking and Electronic Games". When I read that heading, I was expecting a chapter explaining how, when I spend most of my waking hours in front of at least one, and often up to three, computer screens, do I reasonably limit my child's computing time. This has concerned me for a while, especially since I now work from home. Tahlia simply does not - and cannot reasonably be expected to - understand that most of the time when I'm staring at the screen, I'm doing so for work. The entertainment time I spend on the computer is quite small when compared to the working time. Of course, any time spent on the computer by Tahlia is purely play time (Tux Paint is the current can't-close-the-laptop favourite), but this is a distinction that is very hard to express in four-year-old terms.
What I got in Chapter Nine though, was a bunch of rhetoric about how adults, in particular parents of young children, "have an ambivalent relationship with computers, mobile phones and electronic games". Speak for yourself, maybe, but my relationship with technology would be better defined as "life supporting" than "ambivalent". To give Brooks her due, she's addressing a rather broad demographic with this book, and I kept on hoping for a saving grace in this chapter, but it just didn't come. Am I the only tech-savvy adult with small children? I doubt it, especially with work-from-home positions in the technology industry becoming more and more popular.
So, although I consider myself a Gen X-er, and a relative latecomer to technology, there's certainly many older than me who would consider themselves in a simlar way. It seems as though as soon as you hit that magic adult milestone of "parent" you also become a technophobe. I had just started to come to grips with the fact that I wasn't "cool" anymore, by virtue of me being a parent, but now I'm supposed to be petrified of technology as well. Next, I'll be baking pumpkin scones on a wood-fuelled Aga, driving round the roundabouts backwards in my Volkswagon, and telling stories about "when I was your age ...". Oh wait. Well, never mind about that last one ;-)
In essence, Brooks' Chapter Nine still contained some good advice, although it was along the lines of "don't be scared, the technology won't bite you, just get in there and check out what your kids are looking at, who they're talking to". So, to give Brooks her due, it was an interesting topic, and useful despite the pages and pages describing exactly what MySpace is. And as for the rest of the book ... go out and buy it, read it, and follow the advice. If you already know what YouTube is though, skip Chapter Nine. I suggest you Read Chapter Eight twice instead, just to get your money's worth.
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"Consuming Innocence: Popular Culture and Our Children"
Written by Karen Brooks
My copy published by University of Queensland Press, 2008.
You can buy it direct from the UQ Press
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Why all this talk about Gen X and Gen Y? Well, while I was overseas recently I was surfing the interwebs to kill some time in the hotel and came across a reference to a book titled "Consuming Innocence" by Karen Brooks. In addition to being a columnist with the Courier Mail, Brooks is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at the Southern Cross University in Lismore. The book is about
...the complex relationship that kids - from tots and tweens to teens - have with popular culture. It considers the role popular culture and, most importantly, parents play in creating children'sideas of themselves, and fearlessly questions the involvement of the corporations that target kids and promote sexuality.
Despite the marketing language on the back cover (and faithfully reproduced above by your host), which should have warned me off immediately, the book is a fascinating read. So far, I have to recommend that any parent of young children read it, especially as it is aimed specifically for an Australian geographic.
The bit that got me thinking about generation gaps, though, was Chapter Nine - "Give Me Some MySpace: The Cyberlution of Social Networking and Electronic Games". When I read that heading, I was expecting a chapter explaining how, when I spend most of my waking hours in front of at least one, and often up to three, computer screens, do I reasonably limit my child's computing time. This has concerned me for a while, especially since I now work from home. Tahlia simply does not - and cannot reasonably be expected to - understand that most of the time when I'm staring at the screen, I'm doing so for work. The entertainment time I spend on the computer is quite small when compared to the working time. Of course, any time spent on the computer by Tahlia is purely play time (Tux Paint is the current can't-close-the-laptop favourite), but this is a distinction that is very hard to express in four-year-old terms.
What I got in Chapter Nine though, was a bunch of rhetoric about how adults, in particular parents of young children, "have an ambivalent relationship with computers, mobile phones and electronic games". Speak for yourself, maybe, but my relationship with technology would be better defined as "life supporting" than "ambivalent". To give Brooks her due, she's addressing a rather broad demographic with this book, and I kept on hoping for a saving grace in this chapter, but it just didn't come. Am I the only tech-savvy adult with small children? I doubt it, especially with work-from-home positions in the technology industry becoming more and more popular.
So, although I consider myself a Gen X-er, and a relative latecomer to technology, there's certainly many older than me who would consider themselves in a simlar way. It seems as though as soon as you hit that magic adult milestone of "parent" you also become a technophobe. I had just started to come to grips with the fact that I wasn't "cool" anymore, by virtue of me being a parent, but now I'm supposed to be petrified of technology as well. Next, I'll be baking pumpkin scones on a wood-fuelled Aga, driving round the roundabouts backwards in my Volkswagon, and telling stories about "when I was your age ...". Oh wait. Well, never mind about that last one ;-)
In essence, Brooks' Chapter Nine still contained some good advice, although it was along the lines of "don't be scared, the technology won't bite you, just get in there and check out what your kids are looking at, who they're talking to". So, to give Brooks her due, it was an interesting topic, and useful despite the pages and pages describing exactly what MySpace is. And as for the rest of the book ... go out and buy it, read it, and follow the advice. If you already know what YouTube is though, skip Chapter Nine. I suggest you Read Chapter Eight twice instead, just to get your money's worth.
---
"Consuming Innocence: Popular Culture and Our Children"
Written by Karen Brooks
My copy published by University of Queensland Press, 2008.
You can buy it direct from the UQ Press
---
My definition of the word "soon"
OK, so my definition of the word "soon" might differ from everybody else's ... like by about a month. *sigh*. Never mind, all good rules were meant to be broken (even ones like the definitions for common words). The picture is of the Tux cake I made for Tahlia's birthday, which was on the 24th of February. The design was from the Australian Women's Weekly Kids' Birthday Cakes book (a copy of which every self-respecting Australian mother owns, of course!), and I used a Green's chocolate on chocolate cake mix - because I figure that when you're putting that much effort in to the look of the thing, you can cut corners on the actual substance. It took two big packets of cake mix and I had to bake it in a roasting pan to get it big enough. Even then, I had to turn poor Tux's toes in slightly to get them to fit.
One thing I found interesting, nowhere does the Women's Weekly credit the design to Larry Ewing (who drew Tux in an early edition of Gimp), or Linus Torvalds (who's fascination with penguins after being bitten by one at the Canberra Zoo was the basis for the Tux design, and who gave the final thumbs up) or Alan Cox (who made the initial suggestion for Tux on the Linux kernel mailing list), or James Hughes (who gave Tux his name). I guess some people take the liberties of the GPL just a mite too far.
A quick google will reveal that I'm not the first to blog about this, and I am under no expectation that I will be the last, although most that I found sledge the "Party Animals" book, rather than the "Kids' Birthday Cakes" book as the Tux cake (renamed the "Penguin Prince" and sporting a red bowtie) is featured on the front cover. While I fully agree with the sentiments of my fellows in the blogosphere, I can't help but muse on how this oversight came about.
I imagine a poor overworked test kitchen staffer, mixing up some cake batter - the fourteenth batch today - and swiping an errant hair behind her ear as she calls out "What's next? Which bloody cake are we making now? It'd better be a big one, I've got oodles of batter here and I'm not making an extra cake if I don't bloody havta!"
A harried, pimply work experience kid comes flying in and turns the pages in the draft recipe book frantically before raising his wavery voice, "Ah, um, we've run out of recipes Mildred! What should I do?"
Mildred doesn't look up, just keeps beating madly and says "Well use yer head, and make it quick! There must be an animal we ain't done yet. Hurry up, me arm's about to fall off, and I can feel the RSI building up in me elbow!"
The kid scratches his head and then, his eyes drifting over to the computer where the draft of the book is being written by another crazed staffer, recalls his IT teacher going on about Linux and open source and says, "I know! A penguin! Hold on, I'll have an image for you in a jiffy ... and it's open source, so we can use it!"
Okay, so maybe that's a little fanciful, and it pretty much assumes that there exists no Quality Control or proof reading process within the ACP books consortium (the publisher for all AWW titles), but the mind does boggle ...
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People who are blogging about Tux:
Dave Hall
The Thinkers' Podium
If you know of any other posts of interests, feel free to let me know :)
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One thing I found interesting, nowhere does the Women's Weekly credit the design to Larry Ewing (who drew Tux in an early edition of Gimp), or Linus Torvalds (who's fascination with penguins after being bitten by one at the Canberra Zoo was the basis for the Tux design, and who gave the final thumbs up) or Alan Cox (who made the initial suggestion for Tux on the Linux kernel mailing list), or James Hughes (who gave Tux his name). I guess some people take the liberties of the GPL just a mite too far.
A quick google will reveal that I'm not the first to blog about this, and I am under no expectation that I will be the last, although most that I found sledge the "Party Animals" book, rather than the "Kids' Birthday Cakes" book as the Tux cake (renamed the "Penguin Prince" and sporting a red bowtie) is featured on the front cover. While I fully agree with the sentiments of my fellows in the blogosphere, I can't help but muse on how this oversight came about.
I imagine a poor overworked test kitchen staffer, mixing up some cake batter - the fourteenth batch today - and swiping an errant hair behind her ear as she calls out "What's next? Which bloody cake are we making now? It'd better be a big one, I've got oodles of batter here and I'm not making an extra cake if I don't bloody havta!"
A harried, pimply work experience kid comes flying in and turns the pages in the draft recipe book frantically before raising his wavery voice, "Ah, um, we've run out of recipes Mildred! What should I do?"
Mildred doesn't look up, just keeps beating madly and says "Well use yer head, and make it quick! There must be an animal we ain't done yet. Hurry up, me arm's about to fall off, and I can feel the RSI building up in me elbow!"
The kid scratches his head and then, his eyes drifting over to the computer where the draft of the book is being written by another crazed staffer, recalls his IT teacher going on about Linux and open source and says, "I know! A penguin! Hold on, I'll have an image for you in a jiffy ... and it's open source, so we can use it!"
Okay, so maybe that's a little fanciful, and it pretty much assumes that there exists no Quality Control or proof reading process within the ACP books consortium (the publisher for all AWW titles), but the mind does boggle ...
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People who are blogging about Tux:
Dave Hall
The Thinkers' Podium
If you know of any other posts of interests, feel free to let me know :)
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