By Sandshoe
25/11/2010
Driving into a glare of headlights on the Tullamarine freeway at 5.30 am, this the dead of winter in Melbourne and I am talking on a mobile phone to a client parked by Ayers Rock whose kids won’t “go” behind it, who is demanding instruction on what to do when the council toilets are locked, the motor home’s toilet blocked and “the wife” insists I send the van doctor. “She” will otherwise, logically, file for divorce.
The van doctor knows everything, I agree. You will need to learn, a sales manager told me, years ago as we were about to parachute together out of a plane, how to diffuse argument. I hope, first, diversion of my client from his anxiety attack. We discuss the pedestal on which I place the van doctor. The latter, I recall, I refered to at the depot as knowing everything anyone can, although I meant about vans not absolutely everything.
The contrast between the results of my solicitations (but don’t give anything away, I was told by the same sales manager) and my client’s original disinterest in niceties between us lends me belief a moment suggested no other before than his life’s entirety in vain. “Wow,” later in the day he yells into his mobile, “The van doctor is a helluva good bloke. Now about the toilet?”
I hasten to recommend my readers make LifeLine a primary source of reference in crises. I’m no counsellor. You might say Pete’s a roadie, roughly. Fact: anything that’s got wheels, I drive, although done my share of rigging. Six months shooting crocs I don’t usually let on about in a fit. I unlock the depot, thinking what it was like in the Daintree those days, check the night’s vehicles in and the early morning’s out, and in.
Time to traverse the gleaming rows of snub-nosed metal hides, check the polish before helter skelter take vehicles to mechanics, for tyres, petrol, clients at the airport and fax service sheets. I’m literate. Writing a book in my spare time. Easy, service sheets. Fax refrigeration unit details, diagrams of accident damage. I stock take linen, cutlery, frypans, saucepans, microwave dishes… check diary and ring the van doctor. See if he’s a deal on the toilet valves.
A mechanic two doors down is dropping dead of a heart attack in the late afternoon, just before sunset fades. The junior calls by to advise in of course, the retrospect. Tears trace in the oil on her face. “I kissed him,” she says, “I didn’t know what else to do.”
That’s right, the van doctor… He’s always under a motorhome, seems, his arm is up the sewerage outlet. I’m stretched out, flat on a ground cover in the loom of the home. My head is pillowed on a knee pad lying next to the sink fill unit with the glue still drying on the old outlet ring seal and it’s 3.00am.
“I see you did the flyscreens in 531. Any hope of this working?”
The answer is a bout of swearing. I reel off lists of alternative parts distributors.
Check statements of monies owing.
The van doctor and I leave the depot at 4.30am to drive in convoy to my unit on Ascot Vale Road and déjà vu, steak and eggs. I brew coffee. My mobile rings, repeatedly. Tempted crack a tinny. Jim’s wife wants to know where is he. I say, “Here.” She doesn’t believe it. She is at the end of her tether and Jim at his.
Jim muses, “It’s my birthday, Pete.” I retort how amazing it is. “No, every year today,” he snaps and swears, volubly, the minute I tell him it’s my birthday. I think he is kidding he is upset. No, he is upset. Thinks I made up that it’s my birthday. Bloke’s nerves are shot.
The new ‘John’ is at the foot of my ladder. I’m washing a home. No small deal on an hour’s kip. “Who knows,” I hear and look down on my swirl of drive-wayed suds. ‘Jack’, in its middle, personally would, cunning, if he could for me, but no guarantee… best friend… boss… years… watch the water… bloke changes his mind like underwear… every day sometimes… business comes first! The spruiker brandishes a knife out of a hip pocket, shouting he hates Melbourne. The shout is at his mobile even as it rings and he queries, “Van? Doctor?” The thrown knife embeds in the wall of the motor home.
“Where? Who? What? Why? Strikin’? Parts? So’s Santa Claus! S’up the LADDER!”
The mobile sinks under white froth, tossed to the ground.
‘Jack’ turns my way. Least s’pose he did, chewing over this bit. I’m out of the equation, closest reach. Gone. Done a scarper. Quick and the dead.
By Sandshoe
Previously published in: Creative Writers: anthology of poems and stories/edited by Christina Wilson, 1950-/Noarlunga, S. Aust./Christie Downs Community House 2003, [34] p. ;21cm
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
J’ai lu et apprécié votre histoire
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Tres chic mon vieux; you old smoothie…
😉
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Monsieur Hung, j’aime bein votre style. Peut-etre “yo” by any other name. 🙂
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Yeah, the airport that’s nowhere near the city
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yo!
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yo
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oh that’s fantastic.
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yo?
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You are using your painted picture. I’m really happy about that.
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Here. I’m posting a good photo of the picture of you on my painting blog. Please take it and use it when you like.
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Thanks Lehan, will update.
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Wow Hung, the new hair colour really suits you!
😉
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Just sing out if you want your picture, astyages….
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I’ll take pics in the daylight tomorrow of all of them and post them in the same place, you can all just pull them onto your computers from there and use them however you like.
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It’s done. If you want them, take them in the next few days, as I’ll take them down then.
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I hope you like it Lehan that I have foregone my green self and gone au naturel by displaying my portrait you painted of me. Loyalty has no friend like a romantic. It is so astonishing to me you have painted up a storm of patrons de porc. O, thank you so much. It is so oddly like having a family meal cooked for you, but better…without having to dream about washing up the dishes later. They’ll just get done. That’s the “perfect” magic of having this portrait painted.
I didn’t even have to go for a sitting! 🙂
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If you’d done a sitting, none of you would have liked it. Oh, I look….you’d have thought. As it is now I’ve captured in you something none of you have – someone else entirely, that none of us have ever met.
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I’m surprised that Australian kids can’t do their business in the bush. Perhaps we’ve been spoiled by all of those roadside stops, replete with water, shade, parking and composting dunnies.
I’m glad the dying mechanic received a dying kiss, from a (hopefully) beautiful girl. I find it terrible to think that people die without the comfort of other humans. I thought that i was dying a couple of years back, and was happy knowing that Mrs M and youngest son were with me.
Why was this customer so insistent that the ‘van doctor’ come to Ayrer’s Rock? Did your company offer roadside assistance for vans? Or was the chap just being a total dick?
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Silly kids probably paying too much heed to those naturalist-type books we tend to pack in the car with kids for the long distance soujourn away for 6 months and the binoculars, Big M. Lots of photos of the red-flash off the wings of the Black Cockatoo overhead… red stretches of nothingness interspersed with enormous underground caverns with distorted images on their walls of human beings seeming to be running after native animals culling them and in turn on those a spined demonic-in-appearance lizard of one sort or t’other… then there’s someone invariably squinting in the sun holding up an example of the Western/Inland Taipan to be considered and its text… 🙂
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The Kiss. Thanks for that comment, Big M. Those sorts of working conditions too, Big M. There can be so little tenderness, regardless a fierce loyalty that lasts as long as the job between some in the businesses and cul-de-sacs where these industrialised lives are frequently lived.
The mechanic as a skilled ‘journey man’ ending his life I imagine… generally dying at an accelerated rate although I have not looked at those stats … amidst industrial waste and noxious fumes.
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Vis-a-vis did my company offer roadside assistance. I am Pete’s humble channeler. Yes. That of course presupposes a capacity and resources to call on any registered service provider/relevant business within coee-ee of the client that an agent has a relationship with either by contract or on an ad hoc basis…and in the business of rental and particular these complex vehicles it is highly desireable a rental operator knows who is servicing the vehicle of a client (which cannot always be the case).
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I think “the wife”, as the bloke you ask me about if he is “a total dick” calls his darling, was a literalist. I wonder if she believed the fine print of the contract, but was so impressed by Pete’s highlighting the wonderful job the van doctor did (a different subject) preparing vans for their readiness for clients imagined Pete would fly the van doctor to the closest to Uluru airstrip. Herein is a flaw in the fine print of any contract. It has to be read so finely.
I suspect “the wife” was unhappy in her marriage, Big M.
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Motorhomes are not easy for a client who has no previous experience of them to either drive or even anticipate they need service attention.
Think the bloke was attempting to bend over backwards as petitioner to meet his wife’s expectations and achieve harmony … in a space where there likely was not much room to manouevre if the plural “kids” and 5.30 am is anything to judge by. Gosh, that looks like a long day if any one of “the kids” got up and used the toilet unbeknowns to sleeping parents. 🙂
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Did these clients I wonder think to take their instruction manuals out of the glove box and at least read them?
You would hope. 🙂
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The other day when I looked at this story to see where it might need some help (I did take out a half a sentence), I found myself involved in a reverie of angst about Pete experiencing the knife throwing incident. As if I was reading it independently from being the writer…curiously as if I was Pete.
I tell y’… 😉
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Sometimes, shoe, your writing is like being in a room with a television on, working, and you catch some of the dialogue and miss others and the story is jumping around there at the back of your head as you work.
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What she said. Wouldn’t change a word.
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Thank you Lehan.
Your comment could be a descriptive explanation of a great body of Bob Dylan’s writing. (I suddenly thought.)
It is absolutely useful [your comment]… I am interested in the ‘hit’ and ‘miss’ of the human relationship, of English communication and its characteristics, that is not so frequently presented in story telling, readers are rarely I think offered that in the form of actual or imagined (imaginable) dialogue, more frequently within a narrative although I am supposing your reference includes narrative as dialogue. 🙂
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[Lehan please forgive me my modern confusion about how to use the word ‘narrative’. I rush to say I think I do not understand the word as needs be any more. I just found ‘narrative’ popping out of my mind. PS I so love your comment. I love that we are here. Lucky us. 🙂 ]
If anybody feels enthusiastic about describing ‘narrative’ and does I will be so grateful I will return to my inner pig-tailed 6-year old and tell her to run away from school. What a waste of a lot of time a lot of those years were. 😉
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VOICE: I am very happy to recevie your kind comment offered with such a wonderful definite… did I imagine a little sound of a loyalist-to-this-story’s indrawn slightly breath. ‘Course not. 😉
That’s just simply beautiful, Voice.
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Some times I work with the television on behind me. I don’t see what’s happening, but sometimes the dialogue grabs my attention. I’m doing something else, but someone next to me is saying “is this a friend of yours?” It’s like being in a cafe surrounded by different conversations. That’s what your stories are like; it feels like I’ve suddenly come into something and then it’s gone again.
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I’ve thought so much about your comment about the television… and then ‘I’ve suddenly come into something and it’s gone again’. That is an analogy that interests me a lot from the point of view of the style of these pieces. The first sentence sets you up for the idea of “coming into something” because Pete is driving into the headlight glare on the freeway so the story is one of illumination of Pete and the environment of his journey. It is a journey sure enough that takes him into the lives and out of them of the travellers who take out the vans…or rather they into his lives and they are gone again . I recall a couple coming into the depot and inviting me earnestly to go and stay with them in Sydney…the real depot I was acting manager of for a couple of weeks and otherwise assistant manager/acting mgr for a period that was a fly-in and fly-out sort of a job…I think back on them (of course with curiosity) and wonder if they recognised a woman with a razor sharp mind doing that job, but needing a mother-cum-parents they were both so energetically insistent I take them up for a holiday stint in Sydney. They offered in the same hospitable frame of reference someone might if you gave them free rein of your home for nix…yet here they were listening to my run down on their rental van.
They were rare. They were Australian. Almost every renter was from the Middle East and Europe. Few had English.
Marvellous experiences we have along the way of accepting a style of being in a position of employment. I wore one of those tight athletic midrif thingys…might as well call them breast binders…to make me as flat as possible with a black t-shirt on, tucked in, belted black work pants and heavy duty sneaker/boots and I ran up and down ladders and a set of treacherous stairs to a high-up, so high mezzanine platform where the washing from the vans was slung to dry over lines and sometimes dried flat as boards in the heat to save money on drying, after which I pulled them down and tossed them in the dryer to soften them ready for folding, stacking and stocking the vans. The treacherous and uneven steps-no hand rail, eh worth betting on-had to be negotiated on the way down carrying baskets of piled washing including sleeping bags…the loads sometimes had to include curtains out of the vans.
Staff came in an out to service aspects of the vans and sedans, but the Manager and Assistant or the sole charge Manager did everything that was essential including identifying defects in the sounds of engines running and ‘overseeing’ the almost exclusively male agents that came through doing business, meeting contracts, but they know their jobs so well. Over the road were towies and the clanging of their vehicles all day. The noise was deafening. Television programme on in the background. It runs as we speak. Someone is grovelling around on a depot floor or in a pit fixing a vehicle whose family is at home waiting for the worker to knock off and get a bit of kip. Their home lives are indeed in themselves like a television programme…glimpsed rather than lived.
Just got thinking. 🙂
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