His Is A Quiet Carriage

Young people of a number who find producing words from their mouths a difficult task will tend to wear their consciousness lightly. They must on a coin shift weight and pivot quickly in order to pronounce alternative turns of phrase to say what they mean to say but in a new way. It causes one to acknowledge yet formally reject gravity in favour of a mode of buoyancy that relies on a method of falling upwards away from the ribbons of tongue that feel for all the world like they are woven around tank trap tetrahedra.

Twenty years ago in the nineties I had a job working for a soccer club. The punchline to this story is that the club between nineteen ninety five and nineteen ninety seven had no players due to financial declivity yet for contractual reasons the club had to continue as if they did. What I am saying is that it was my job to simulate soccer matches for radio and the occasional news video highlight reel so as to present the illusion that the Broadmeadow Magic were still a fully functioning team even though it was just me late nights in a little office beside the empty field.

One early evening near the field there was an accident where an old Commodore performed an unsuccessful merge. Bits of broken car were scattered across three lanes and in this old mother hubbard dress the driver of the Commodore kneeled and gathered up what she could including shards of reflective plastic that caught the low sun like handfuls of wedding confetti rendered some long years later as glitter misremembered in a day drunk pollyanna dream. She looked so tired and all I could think was how much I wanted to help her go to sleep.

At times an opposing team of real footballers would visit my office to record their voice trails and ambient grunts for a radio broadcast. A couple of them would vocalise into a paper cup to add distance and space to the recording while the rest would watch The Late Show with David Letterman in the adjoining kitchenette. Our favourite episodes were the ones where Dave would ring random numbers to ask about the weather and more often than not nobody would answer and I would close my eyes and see myself in those otherwise empty homes observing the phone ring out amid pleats of dust and light.

One of the ways I would confront my stuttering was to pretend I was sleep walking through a conversation. Through this gauze of reduced consequence I would record audio broadcast summary snippets of games to be sent on to 1233 Newcastle ABC. Spaced out my mouth would lazily drawl a run of familiar names Cleary passes to Horadam and onto Selwood and mostly I would let the other team win but on the occasions we were the victors the station would light up with calls from elated fans barely able to put into words finally we had it you know as they say in us all along.

A handful of times during this period I was asked by NBN Television to provide five second video match highlight reels for the evening news. It was one of those situations where I could have asked players from other teams to shadow play on the field but I understood due to mid nineties enamorment with arcade video game racers that less real representations of objects in the world were often more visibly believable than the so called real thing. Sega Japan had recently developed an AM2 chip for virtual reality that showed how a field mown into high contrast quadrants could beneath moon glow produce undulating motion.

And so on balmy nights with a low resolution camera in hand I would choose vantage points for the lens to rest on one or another life giving polygon shadow while through mounted speakers the then new Oasis record would play. This past week I have been time traveling through clips of Liam Gallagher one moment able to hit all the high notes he wants and then a decade later Noel talking about how Liam used to be able to hit all the high notes in Live Forever for example. Although when I watch an old acoustic set promoting their first LP it is Noel who hits the high notes in Live Forever and not Liam.

Out on the field I would as I gazed from the field into the mountain range behind the storm drain valley and horse stables where the stadium lights cast silhouettes against the hillside see illuminated teeming millions as is the way with god to whom I was nothing if not similar in how I also used light and distance to simulate the passage of time. Although of cause we all need to admit these days that none of us around here are god least of all particularly of course god is not god anymore if you follow me. Talk about the Australian sublime no not Letterman nor Oasis nor the AM2 chip but that local down under suburban feeling of the midnight Summer exotic which I would not even say was due to being out here on the soccer pitch with its baptismal grass but rather I think because of that antique monster footfalling down the mountain with what I swore could be heard as the soft shoe shuffle of an archetype in recline as if the geography was producing its own heart murmurs padding the underside of muted skin pulled taut over soil like the opening bars of a prayer without end.

The season after this which was the final season before the club got its act together and found money to find players again I recorded my audio match descriptions in an even more dreamlike manner that was in the modern parlance not unlike an auto sensory meridian response video where the intention is to lull the listener into a giddy state of deep relaxation. When 1233 Newcastle would play my broadcast I would watch the city fall asleep like that which Wordsworth described but in reverse. The city now doth like a garment wear its resignation into slumber.

As I would fall asleep in the kitchenette of the office beside the empty field I would from time to time see the lady in the old mother hubbard dress who crashed her Commodore near the field. Through traffic as if across a stilled lake I would walk out and embrace her. Without substitution or hesitation although she would initially think I was saying ambulance ambulance I would actually be saying somnambulate somnambulate and the traffic signal lights would change and nobody would move and with extended release of tongue and mouth I would say somnambulate and so on.