Bundlebloom

The sky opened up thirty minutes ago and too much rain fell out and now the rail north has been shut down. A tree fell across the line, or the tracks have been washed away, or some other ruinous event caused by a storm that is rapidly heading down the coast in our direction. No rain here yet, wherever here is, some forty minutes out from Sydney, although now sandwich boards are being blown around the platform by a wind only just starting to flex its potential. A woman in her fifties, a school teacher, shepherds sixty infant school children to a covered area near the toilets where she cups her mobile phone in both hands as if nursing soup or cradling a stick insect. She raises the device into the measured gravity of her gaze and does not blink. Over the PA we learn that buses and coaches are not able to leave the depot due to the conditions, so people had best make other arrangements to get away from here. Taxis are filing out but none are arriving.

I start receiving messages from colleagues at Sydney airport, all flights cancelled, absolute havoc, does anybody have friends in the city that can put them up, send an email to let the team know you are safe or not. Getting a place for the night is the most pressing course of action so I ring through to our corporate travel agency for accommodation. Nothing local, all booked up minutes ago. The city is booking up quickly too now that flights are down. There are a couple of rooms left in a CBD block of luxury serviced apartments, but they fall outside of our booking policy because of how expensive they are. I ring my boss to get the all clear, either I sleep in a stationary train carriage tonight or we foot the bill for a waterproof room with a harbour view of the pending apocalypse. Minutes later I am on a standing room only train back into the city, heavy carbon clouds rolling up the rear view skyline and removing any previously visible objects in a sweep of total erasure.

Fortunately the hotel is only a two minute run from Town Hall station and most of the distance is sheltered by the elongated archways of St. Andrew’s cathedral that, by way of jigsawed shadows, fashion woven brick corridors on past the rear entrance by the choir hall, the wedding steps, the maintenance garage where a pipe organ lays deconstructed, and on past the bus stop where the roofing halts and, the storm now here in all its immodesty, dumping torrents of heavy black raindrops on the streets like a fallen theatre curtain of infinitely drenched static, guides slick neon bloodlines of bus and taxi headlights from the footpath on across the road where I hold my bag above my head and fall through the doors of the Davier Hotel. As the computers are down all rooms and keys are being manually prepared by administration on another floor, so the concierge directs me to a lounge area to wait with two women, one of whom is noticeably pregnant. They are watching a classical pianist perform on a television mounted beside ten metre high windows that, in a state of being thrashed by the storm, blockade the lobby from the street.

The pianist is a young man with his head lowered into the keyboard one minute and raised to the stage lights the next as the song, French sounding, Debussy or Rameau perhaps, flows in runs of shifting tempo decisions that bring to mind a dancer practicing a move that will lead into a jump, starting slow and then taking strides into a canter that transitions into a gentle spin and then a necessary slowing in order to take stock of the move and try again. When the man, who must be only in his early twenties, tilts his head back as the tempo restrains, the lenses of the teashade glasses he is wearing render to a state of opaque bright white, like two full moons, twins, hanging side by side in black metal frames. His hair could have been made from a manicured segment of the golden fleece that Jason returned with from Colchis, so immaculately it reclines and radiates the entire history of grain and sunlight above his peace smoothed brow. A crack of thunder roars across the city, causing the pregnant woman to jump a fair inch above her seat. Once the sound of the thunder has dissipated the other woman turns to the pregnant woman and I and says, imagine if the pianist was not a handsome young man but instead a rather unattractive, poorly dressed old slob, can you imagine putting him on the front of an album cover of Deutsche Grammophon.

I travel through an interior walkway that connects the hotel to a labyrinth food court, an architectural mirror to the open air corridors of St. Andrew’s cathedral, the choir hall now Uncle Tetsu’s Triple-Baked Cheesetarts, the wedding steps a Timezone with a new Space Invaders game that I put a couple of dollars in before getting a bag of fried chicken and heading back to the lobby. The women have gone and the television is off. We have lost all power down here, the concierge tells me, but our generators are operating the elevators and the rooms, you will be fine. I travel in a golden elevator of tessellating triangles that remind me of the pixelated alien craft from Space Invaders, frozen geometric segments of the pianist’s hair perhaps, his manicured fleece rendered in Euclidean ostinato patterns, micro melodic tokens pressed between rising floors that draw a line from middle C through G flat through B flat and back up to C and open onto floor seventeen.

When I enter the room it is all soft light and dark furniture and, while not immediately resembling anything like the soft curved trajectories of a woman’s body, it is nonetheless beautiful. I draw back the curtains and watch as the windows bend inward from the pressure of the wind. Later beneath the heavy crimson sheets of the bed I try to persuade each revolving piece of history in my head to fade backwards and to instead allow the inside of my mind to act as a singular vacuum of warmth and light, to absorb the insulating darkness of this room within this storm, and to dissolve.

A couple of days later I am with my infant son and our Finnish Lapphund, Jonsi, some ten minutes down the street, walking around a velodrome that never has its gates locked. The apron of the velodrome is a lake of clouds that my son plods his red boots in, smudging the sky against the côte d'azur, washing up against a gallery of spray painted graffiti that will drive me away from this place once he learns to read, or at least before he starts visually interpreting the more menacing designs. It begins with Hello Kitty propped up on a green leaf with High Kitty written beneath, then a Pac Man ghost holding a balloon, looking sad, a thought bubble rising behind it containing the words Risk Shit. My dog is sitting on the next one, a pink love heart with cursive font beside spelling out, in black, Ratchet Bitches and, in yellow, Cocaina. The simplest piece of graffiti on the whole velodrome is saved for the starting line, in all capitals with no accompanying imagery, the phrase Eat The Rich.

This is one of the many isolated, mostly abandoned urban areas I bring my son and dog to wander around. For them, they get an expansive arena to climb and urinate in at their leisure (my son the former, my dog the latter, so far), and I get the security of knowing the space is mostly fenced, providing me some sort of time-stretched ambiance, out of view of motorways and the lives of others, so I can walk and breathe and think and watch my son and Jonsi play in this built up disjecta. We also visit the grounds of an uninhabited technical college that has been superseded for another campus, casting our voices across swathes of unkempt grass towards broad concrete ramps and tall buildings of infinite bricks, one of which has a clock that has misplaced its hands.

I did the same with my daughter ten years ago, bringing her to these lonely spaces to learn to play without people, to socialise with geometry, to remind myself of where I was most comfortable as a young lad, balancing on concrete wheel stops in the car parks of the public libraries and tourist information centres my parents used to clean. And, after hours, sitting in the small parkland areas of business courtyards designated as employee lunch break quarters during the day, repurposed as daydream quarters for sensitive children to tend their melancholy of a night. I say melancholy, but really what I refer to is a heightened state of morality, as one throws a fantasy of oneself forwards in time in order to inhabit an elasticity, to feel what shapes you might need to later become.

Presently two older boys, scrappy, thin limbed lads just on the verge of teenhood, run out from beneath the scaffolded seating area overlooking the velodrome. They look like they are trying to lose somebody who might have been chasing them, likely in good humour, as they laugh and catch their breath against a metal bench. I take stock of where my son and dog are now that other souls have infiltrated our previously solitary bubble. My son is just behind me, walking across the wet grass, and Jonsi is on the high side of the track near the Pac Man ghost, his paws dripping with mud. One of the lads, the shorter of the two, feels around beneath the bench and pulls out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter in a plastic bag. Jonsi heads over to where the boys are sitting and sniffs at their tracksuit pants. The taller boy encourages him to jump up, to shake his hand, and he sticks his bony face deep into the thick double layer of Scandinavian fur that blankets Jonsi. I walk towards them and say, hey, careful he doesn’t get you all muddy, and the lad jumps up off the seat in fright. His face for a second is all grave hollow, and I say, it’s all good, I just don’t want you to get dirty.

Some other kids of a similar age, a guy and a girl, run up to the lads and, after each taking a cigarette, they climb the scaffolded seats and onto a shipping container where they sit and look towards the first decay of sunlight. The container is painted green like plastic army soldiers, and on the broad side facing the velodrome entrance someone has drip painted a map of sorts, a treasure map like you used to see printed on the place mats of fast food restaurants. I look for the X but, unable to locate it, assume it is beyond the map. The kids laugh into each other as the lad who patted Jonsi stands up and improvises a song and dance routine. He is theatrical, limbs rubbery as they swing through space, his elbows extruded like pins holding together a hobby store physics experiment. I call my son over and he toddles up the slope, over High Kitty, and we lead Jonsi out towards the gravel car park.

I follow now as my son runs over to an oval shaped puddle the size of which I incorrectly imagine a prehistoric egg, like that belonging to a triceratops, would have been. Later I would look this up and realise that big dinosaurs actually had relatively tiny eggs, the size of an asteroid perhaps after it has crumbled its way through space and landed as a pebble on a shed in someone’s backyard. Or are those called meteors. From little things big things grow, but as I look at my son I think, so too the opposite. We pick up gravel rocks and I pass mine to my son to throw into the puddle. He throws them one at a time, watching each in turn as they arc into the shallow pool. Some of the rocks poke their angular points out of the water as they settle on the ground. When we start to run out of good sized gravel to throw I reach in and retrieve some of the rocks I can see leaning out of the water, but my son rejects these. He knows they have been thrown in already because they are wet. No wet, he says. He wants rocks that have not already been thrown in, that he has not already seen arc and glide from his hand into the water. Jonsi is urinating a couple of feet away from the puddle. I gather a half handful of remaining decent gravel nearby and pass them over, where my son examines them before gazing long into the water.