By Gregor Stronach

It was such a horrible cliché of a day: I was travelling cross country – it doesn’t really matter from where – with the arse out of my trousers and barely two pennies to rub together, when I fell short of luck.

I was stranded at a cross roads, and to be honest, I had no idea where I was. I rummaged through my pockets and discovered a neatly folded $20 note – the last of any currency, I was sure, that I would see for some time.

I’ll spare you the preamble – the back-story is as long and tedious for you as it would be hellishly painful for me to recount. But, in the interests of understanding, let me say this:

I have never felt as mournful, and as alone, as I did on that night. Devoid of spirit, bereft and broken of heart. Poor in health and material wealth, I had all but given up entirely. Bad news had piled on bad news. Broken bones and broken homes. I’d had everything I wanted, and I’d let it all burn.

But I digress. You don’t need to know all about that. I’ve something more important to pull on your coat about. Because something happened. After months of tears and questions and bemoaning a horrible fate that I felt no control over at all, something happened.

On that darkening evening, stomach growling, I decided to spend my last paltry dollars on food, to satiate the gnawing beast that was singing praises to the demigods from just above my beltline.

It was a cheap, nasty and difficult place – one of those commercial crossroads that sprout like concrete mushrooms wherever major highways converge, where families and travellers stop to pee for the twelfth time that day, and the truckies can pull in for a bite to eat and some small comforts from the lot lizards who ply their sexual trade among the parked-up semis in the yard.

I had a choice of eatery – the slick, hard-tack of fast food, whose golden arches soared above a parking lot full of Subarus and Volvos, or the promise of something greasier and easier from the smaller, danker diner surrounded by Macks and Kenworths.

I chose the latter – selfishly, to be honest. I was far more likely to find a ride to where I was going from within the ranks of the professional drivers than I was with a family, racing home so Dad can get back to work on time in the morning and the 2.4 kids in the back can take a break from their in-car DVDs just long enough to stop being carsick.

I pushed through the door, slouched past the ready mob of occupants, and took a seat at a booth in the corner, away from the window. I’d had enough of watching the road over the past three weeks. I was making my way vaguely northwest, away from my hometown and out into the interior, with an eye to heading further west if the stories I’d heard of a mining boom were true. I had nowhere to be.

Nowhere to be.

The waitress stopped by, took my order and gave me a once-over with a well-practiced eye.

“You’ll be waiting here a while for a ride, champ,” she sniffed, and motioned around the diner. “Most of these guys will be tucking in and bedding down for the night. Which way are you headed?”

I told her.

“Yeah… you’ll catch a ride in the morning. You can stay in here as long as you need to, but you can’t sleep here. It’s a diner. Not a motel. Understand?”

I nodded, wearily, confused that the mere mention of sleep had made me instantaneously tired. I ordered my food – one burger, some chips, and a coffee to warm me up. She didn’t even bother writing it down – she just scooted off in the direction of the kitchen, deftly avoiding a pinch on the bottom from one of the truckies at a seat three booths over.

My food arrived four or five uneventful minutes later, and it was just as I’d expected. The chips were limp, but plentiful. The burger, magnificent. And the coffee strong enough to take on Tyson and go 12 rounds … but not strong enough to win. I was halfway through my meal when she wandered by again.

“How’s the food?” she asked, not really caring.

“Fine. Rather good, actually,” I replied, not really caring that she didn’t really care.

“Great. Wanna refill on the coffee?”

I started to rifle through the shrapnel in my pocket, when she touched me on the arm and pointed to a sign on the counter. Handwritten, rather hurriedly, it hadn’t been there when I’d looked up a few moments before.

“Free refils on coffee just ask your waitres,” it read.

I nodded. She smiled. The coffee was refilled. I settled in to wait out the long, dark hours of the night.

…

It was probably around 2am that I noticed things had gotten pretty quiet. The diner was a 24-hour affair, but even places like this have that magical witching hour, when everything shuts down slowly and even the cockroaches take time off from their scurrying to nap quietly among the crumbs of the diner’s detritus.

Which is why I was so surprised when the opposite bench seat of my booth was suddenly occupied by a man, all dressed in black, with a glint in his eye so wicked that I was sure I was about to become the unwitting star in an apocryphal crossroads urban tale.

“…help you?” I managed, before the stranger beamed a smile.

“You can see me now. That’s great! I’ve been waiting ages…” he said. His voice was deep, confident without being loud. But I could hear him like he was shouting, and I doubted he could be heard more than a metre away.

“Who are you?” I asked. I’d heard stories that started like this before – where a lonely traveller meets a dark, fearsome stranger in a truck stop who turns out to be a murderer. Or the Devil Himself.

“Oh… I’m not the Devil, my friend. Nor am I Death,” he said, reading my thoughts. Very quietly, I began to feel fear. There’s no way this could end well…

“It will end well, my friend. It’s okay. I’m not Death,” he smiled. “I am Life.”

I slumped. A Christian. Here… in the middle of fucking nowhere, and I was about to receive a two-in-the-morning proselytising from a grinning weirdo with no hope of escape.

“Relax… I’m not here to preach. I just want to talk.”

I looked him up and down once more.

“Well… more accurately, I’m here to show you a few things. Here…” he grabbed at my hands.

This made very little sense, and I became convinced that I was, perhaps, asleep – against the very wishes of the helpful young waitress and her hastily hand-lettered sign.

“You’re not asleep. At least, not yet… but you will be soon. I need you to sleep, because the things I need to tell you – well, your mind won’t cope with them while you’re awake.

“Look,” he said, reaching across the table once more. “It’s probably best I just show. Close your eyes. Relax… relax… relax…”

“Ummm… are you touching my leg?” I asked.

“Yesss… just a bit…” he whispered. “Just relax… it’s okay…”

“Yeah, no. It’s not okay. Really,” I said.

“Sure. Sure… no problem,” he said, looking a little bit disappointed. He brought his left hand up above the table once more, clasped my hand again and began to breathe. Small tendrils of smoke whisped from his nostrils on the exhale, only to disappear once more when he inhaled.

“This… this is what I need you to see…”

And it began:

It was an accident scene. Gruesome and appalling, the road was wet with oil, water and gore. Two cars were engaged in a brutal, violent head-on waltz – clinched like roman wrestlers, motionless as twisted metal gargoyles, watching silently over the corpses of their occupants.

I was stunned. He was grinning.

He motioned to the rear seat of the furthest car.

“Go,” he smiled. “Look.”

Without sensing any movement, I was at once at the window, peering in like a hideous voyeur. In the back seat was a baby capsule. In the capsule, a small, wounded child.

His eyes, bright blue, were staring straight through me – I clearly couldn’t be seen. In that instant, I realised that there was absolutely nothing I could do to help. I was merely a spectator – not forced to watch, not strong enough to look away.

“Is he okay?” I asked Life.

He shrugged, and smiled.

“Probably not – but I’ll do you a deal. Understand the lesson, and I’ll do what I can.”

“Lesson? What lesson…”

He said nothing. I looked in through the window once again, and the same sight greeted me. His tiny mop of blonde hair was matted with blood. I would have expected he would be crying his little lungs out by now.

“He’s in shock,” Life explained from just next to my left ear. “That’s why he’s so quiet. But he’ll start wailing soon.”

I paused.

“But no one will hear him…” I whispered.

“Except us,” Life smiled.

I looked once more into the toddler’s bright eyes, then turned my head to follow his gaze. Across two lanes of empty blacktop, upon a tilting star picket holding up a rusting three-strand wire fence, stood a crow.

The black bird’s piercing gaze had met that of the child. There was not even a skerrick of understanding between them, but I knew what was happening.

The child, without knowing it in the slightest, was fighting for its life. The bird, unemotional, was waiting for its dinner. The universe would sort this out. I couldn’t help myself.

I started to cry.

“Oh, come now,” Life beamed. “Your money’s no good here… and your tears aren’t for him. They’re for you.”

He touched my arm…

And we were gone.

We were standing in a darkened living room, in a suburban house in northwestern Sydney. A large buffet, bulging with knick-knacks stood along one wall – and pride of place on top, in the centre, was a tiny aluminium-framed fish tank.

Surrounding the fish tank was a not-inconsiderable quantity of water. It dripped quietly from the edge of the buffet, landing with a series of soft woollen ‘plops’ on the tight-weave carpet between the bare feet of a young boy. He was about three.

He stood next to a chair, dragged from the dining room and placed strategically by the buffet, so as to allow him access to the fish tank. In his cupped hands – a single goldfish. It looked dead, the boy distraught.

“Oh, man…” I moaned.

“It’s even worse than it looks… watch…” Life smiled.

There was a movement, and the boy’s mother arrived at the door. She took in the scene with one glance, as mothers are universally able to do, and sighed.

“What’s happened, little man?” she asked.

The boy sobbed. Once. Very quietly.

“I think he died,” he said, proffering the fish to his mother. “I took him for a walk and now I think he’s dead.”

The mother leaned in, looked closely.

“I think he might be,” she said quietly. “I don’t think he’s okay…”

“Are you sure?” the boy asked, before brightening suddenly. “Can I put him back in? See if he’s okay?”

The mother pulled the young boy into an embrace. Whispered that everything would be okay. And even without seeing his face, I could see that for a split second, that little boy honestly believed her… and that everything would be okay.

But in my heart, I knew that it wouldn’t be.

And we moved

To a bar, where an elderly man looked around the pub with rheumy eyes, before asking if someone could please drive him home.

“What’s wrong, Harry?” asked the woman behind the bar.

“It’s me wife… I think she’s dying, and I need to get home”

And we moved

To a park, where a young man was watching his girlfriend die, her asthmatic lungs too weak to work, and the wail of an ambulance barely audible in the distance.

And we moved

To a public toilet where, with the last vestiges of consciousness, a junkie realised that the fix he’d just piped directly to his heart would probably be the last thing he ever did.

And we moved

To a stark, featureless emptiness. I felt a sudden ghastly vertigo, and Life was instantly at my side, grasping my elbow with one hand and smiling like a carnival clown.

“Why?” I asked, shuddering. “Why show me these things?”

“You needed to see them. Therein lies the lesson…”

He smiled. We waited.

I turned the scenes over and over in my mind, but with each passing minute, my confusion overrode my ability to think. There was no lesson here. I sobbed in frustration, the sobs giving way to long, wailing howls of anger and remorse.

…

I don’t know how long I shouted for. But eventually, I simply ran out of steam.

But I knew. There was no lesson here.

“Are you okay?” Life asked, smiling politely.

“I hope so,” I said.

“Now there’s a word…” he grinned. “Hope.”

I arched an eyebrow by way of a question. After all I’d seen on this dark and horrible night, I could barely muster a word.

“If I were to ask you, ‘what have you seen tonight?’ what would you answer?”

I pondered for a moment.

“Death. You say you are Life, yet all you’ve shown me is death… and despair,” I murmured. My strength returned.

“You’re not a blessing. You’re a fiend,” I spat. “Every scene tonight has been a hopeless, horrifying experience. Innocence at the cusp of ending forever. Vitality oozing toward oblivion. Tears. Blood. Pain. Unimaginable utterings from the mind of the kind of beast that haunts the boundaries of my dreams…”

He smiled throughout.

“And…?”

I stopped.

He waggled his eyebrows.

“Hope?” I asked.

His eyes twinkled.

“Hope?”

His eyes brightened even further.

“Yes!”, he exclaimed. “YES!”

He danced a Snoopy-like dance of joy.

“Beyond all of the fear, above all of the pain, through all of the blood and surpassing even death itself, is hope,” he shouted, falling quiet so suddenly, I thought I’d been deafened. He rushed toward me, and grabbed my face between his hands, squeezing my cheeks with his palms.

“Let me help you… Think back…”

And I did.

The toddler’s eyes were vacant, devoid of expression – but at their very heart burned a flicker of hope with every tiny sound he heard.

Each drip… “Is that my mother?”

Each creak of the car… “Is that my mother?”

And on we moved

The young boy’s hands were trembling, and with each gentle shake, the fish seemed to quiver.

“He’s moving!” the boy exclaimed.

But the mother knew. She knew the truth.

And on we moved

To the front door of Harry’s house, where he let himself in with as much pace as he could muster. He heard a sound in the living room, and his heart seemed to leap. Could she still be alive?

And again, we moved

To the park, where the ambulance seemed to be getting louder, and the woman’s breathing more laboured and coarse.

And once more, we moved

To the toilet, to the junkie, whose panicked flailings had embedded the needle deeper into his arm, providing just enough pain to provide a point of focus – possibly just enough to stop him from closing his eyes, forever.

With a sound like a furious rushing wind, I was back with him once again.

“Hope…” I whispered.

“Hope,” he agreed. “It’s the single greatest gift that a man can have. You live your lives on the basis that one day, you all will die. And for most of you, that day is always considered so far away, that you barely give it a moment’s thought.

“If you did, it would paralyse you. Fight or flight is the primal response to fear with which you’ve been hard-coded. And the vast majority of people are so de-tuned to it all, that even that has been dulled to the point where you don’t consider death, even for a moment, most days of your life.

“And the people who aren’t desensitised are the ones you say are “mad” – the ones who fight the world around them with every drawn breath. The ones who rage to the skies – torture, bind and kill others…”

He paused.

“And then there are those who are, on an otherwise unremarkable day, confronted with the reality of their own mortality. Some buckle, and weep. Others grow defiant, and angry. Others simply retreat into their own special darkness.

“But every single one of them harbours a hope. And it’s the ones who lose hope, who are the ones who don’t survive…”

I barely had time to register my thoughts, before once more we were on the move.

Back

To the child in the car. Life leaned in the window, wiped the blood from the toddler’s face, stepped back and scared away the crow. He touched the lifeless hand of the young woman in the front seat, which twitched.

The movement caught the youngster’s eye, dragging his gaze from the receding image of the huge black crow flying away to find sustenance elsewhere. He barked out a short, coughing cry.

“Honey?” the woman said, and the boy – recognising his mother’s voice – howled.

“Sshh…” she whispered, fumbling at the seatbelt that she was sure had saved her life. “Mummy’s coming… Sshhh…”

Back

To the dining room, where a mother guided her young son’s hands, with their precious cargo of rapidly stiffening goldfish back towards the fishbowl in the hope that she was wrong.

As the fish touched the water, Life touched the fish. With a flick, it was away, the solemn silence broken by the delighted peals of joyous laughter. The smile on the young boy’s face was only matched in its intensity by the look of surprise on his mother’s.

Back

To Harry’s house, where he called from the front door.

“Ivy! Ivy, my love!”

Silence, punctuated by a slight rustling.

Urged on, Harry moved into the living room. There, on the floor, clutching a cross to her chest, which rose and fell slowly like a gentle tide, was Ivy. Kneeling beside her, smiling, was Life.

Back

To the park, where Life himself was breathing tenderly into the young woman’s tortured lungs. And where the sudden arrival of a stranger with Ventolin had changed the course of two young people’s lives.

Back

To the park toilet, where Life was squeezing the arm of the junkie, extruding the morphine from his vein like a river of white death.

And I was back at the diner.

Alone.

…

Postscript: Mike let me know that Waz could do with some cheering up. So I sat down to write something funny, and short. But this came out instead. It’s easily the longest thing I’ve written in about ten years. And I’ve no fucking idea where it came from.

 

At the heart of it, it’s just a story. And there’s a ham fisted attempt to tell impart some form of wisdom in there. Fuck… I dunno. It’s just a story. Make of it what you will.

 But I’d like to underscore the take-home message here.

Without hope, we are nothing.