Mr o winds back the cloc.., p.1
Mr O Winds Back the Clock, page 1
Mr O Winds Back the Clock
First published in 2024 by Intricate Books
Copyright © I J Baker 2024
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
all rights reserved.
Without limiting the rights under copyright restricted above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner of this book. The views of the author belong solely to the author and are not necessarily those of the publisher or the publishing service provider.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia
isbn: 978-1-7635379-0-3 (hardback)
isbn: 978-1-7635379-1-0 (paperback)
isbn: 978-1-7635379-2-7 (ebook)
Cover design by Duncan Blachford
The characters presented in this work are fictitious. Any similarities with real people, living or dead, are coincidental.
For Serena and Clea
“One of the marks of a gift is to have the courage of it. If they haven’t got the courage, it’s just too bad.” katherine anne porter, interviewed for The Paris Review, 29, Winter–Spring 1963
Contents
Unempayment
WINTER
All Those Fabulous Heads
If Some’s Good, More’s Better
The Generosity of Steve
SPRING
Another Saturday Night
Genuine Filter Coffee
Prognosticating with Pash
SUMMER
A Roll in the Hay
Bellyaching about Bob
Are You Happy Now?
AUTUMN
What Becomes of Us
The Soul and its Appetites
All Grown Up
What Are You Waiting For?
Unempayment
I HAD not thought that my executioner would be Danny. I had assumed that Danny would be insufficiently senior. He was chief sub-editor, and therefore my supervisor, but he did not have an office, and mostly he left me alone. I had not even logged on. I had sat at my workstation, which was set a little apart from most others, next to the desk used by Helga, our spare layout sub-editor, who had been promoted from real-estate copy sub, and who came in three days a week and made every second page look the same. It was as though she had learned two ways to assemble the headlines and pictures and paragraphs, and had felt no desire to learn more. It used to impress me that she could sustain her two editorial designs across the multiple shapes that had been left her to fill, shapes defined by the ad people when they stacked small advertisements. She may see herself here, but I doubt she will sue. For one thing, I have not accused Helga of incompetence. Her behaviour was competent. She understood what she needed to do, and she did it. We would talk only a little. The incompetent worker was I.
Perhaps Helga had complained of the way that I smelled. Perhaps she had thought that I should have shaved more. And that I should have carried in with me each morning less support for the hypothesis that I had washed down my breakfast with whiskey. But this was newspapers, and we all made allowances. The subs, most of us old hands, believed that one of our number undertook a breath test each day in a room behind the front desk, and was no longer permitted to let himself into our building via the rear door with his electronic key. Perhaps I too would be forced to sacrifice my freedom of entry. That had looked like a prospect I could set to one side until my moment arrived. I allowed myself only one drink, sometimes two, since I had a long drive to work. A third drink would make sure I was late, and therefore it commonly led to a fourth. If I poured a fourth drink, and embarked upon a fourth cigarette, I would not go to work.
Had I taken three drinks that morning? I believe that I may have been late. Having sat down at my workstation, I had been trying to prise my reading glasses from their hard black case, so that I could see my monitor well enough to log on. Danny had loomed to my left. Danny is a little shorter than I am, and a little younger, and a little better-looking. His face reminds me of a kelpie’s face, pointy and shrewd. And like me, he is slight. He stood beside me but behind the line of my shoulders. I had registered an approach, but I knew the approach was from Danny only because it had become his habit to approach me in this way, on those occasions when he chose to approach me.
I had wondered for a moment what he would ask of me. Would he request that I proofread a late advertorial insert, a job that I believed was a job for the ad team? Had a reader drawn his attention to an error in one of our titles? Danny had grown circumspect when drawing my attention to allegations of error. Mostly I could explain to him that the reader was wrong: that the alleged error was not an error but established house style, style that an ignorant reader might mistake for an error. I was the custodian of the Guide to Style, as Danny was happy to acknowledge. I was our last line of defence, our deflector of likely own-goals. They paid me just to catch errors, and what else I did was optional, mainly. I did not need to change headlines, except to correct errors. I didn’t need to enhance readability. I did not need to rewrite whole paragraphs, paragraphs that some enthusiastic young reporter had written, and that a sub-editor might have rewritten before he sent them to me for review. And certainly, very certainly, I did not need to excise every contraction from any phrase that did not quote, directly, a source.
I am not sure even now why I had come to see such excisions as high priorities for my attention. No reader paid for these papers. We had them tossed onto residents’ doorsteps, so that they could draw eyes to paid ads that they carried. If I were to return to work of this kind, I would no longer place such importance on the excisions. It was not as though somebody had told me to make them. To transform every don’t to a do not, and every you’ve to a you have. Doubtless Danny had wondered why I was doing this, when he discerned that I was indeed doing this.
“Seamus, I need a word.”
Danny.
“Word away, Danny,” I said, resisting the temptation to ask him just which word he needed. It isn’t difficult for me to remember how I responded. I did not even turn my head.
“In the meeting room.”
This was a room on our floor that housed a round glass-topped table and four or five chairs. And our accessible archives: bound bundles of recent editions, stacked up against two of the walls. A rectangular window was located high on the long wall, trimmed with a venetian blind that was left all but closed. We subs never held meetings. On Monday nights, after we had finished the most widely distributed papers, which covered the relatively wealthy southern suburbs nearest the city centre, immediately on our side of the Yarra River, we would yell at one another over beers from our workstations, celebrating the end of the grind and an impending day off. I could not recall having entered the space Danny indicated except to look at past papers. But I could see little point in resisting. Had I intuited that this would be my moment, and had I received that intuition with relief?
Danny closed the door and selected a chair. From his manner, I guessed that I was not about to be commended, or offered promotion without commendation.
“I don’t want to say this, but I have to.”
People deny agency when arriving at all sorts of choices.
“We want you to take a bit of a rest. Take some time off. We’ll keep paying you.”
And so they would keep paying me. While I took some time off. I think I felt a moment of panic. A sharp stab of fear as I contemplated the prospect of taking time off. Of absenting myself not because I had chosen to, but because somebody else had decreed that I must. Somebody—and originally, this may well have been Danny—had made a judgment about the value of my presence in this office, and had adjudged me a net non-contributor. By implication, that judgment might be revised. Did I resort, in that moment, to hoping that it would be revised? I wonder whether, instead, I waited without hope, while the fear found a warm place at the base of my stomach and set up a small shack. An extended absence from this grey place of toil, while they paid me, sounded very appealing, were it not for the prospect that I might never return, and that they might cease to pay me.
“We’ll keep paying you,” Danny said, “but there will be conditions.”
Oh yes. There always are conditions.
I HAD drunk freely of Jim Beam bourbon whiskey, and less freely of brandy and beer. I had allowed myself freedom in the smoking of cigarettes. But over the five months prior to my moment arriving, I had smoked only two bongs. I had smoked also four or five joints, two in company and the remainder alone, on the latter occasions combining tobacco broken out from a tailor-made cigarette with a ration from a small parting gift. I have smoked no bongs since. If I were to smoke another bong, I would smoke only for old times’ sake, among survivors from those with whom I once smoked bongs frequently. The prospect of smoking a bong no longer thrills me, as perhaps the prospect of smoking a joint thrills a little. When you smoke a bong it is as though you smoke two strong joints in succession, and all at once, and all just for you.
When it was proposed to me that I write about happy experiences, as a means of direction, as a revisiting that might uncover a path that had become overgrown, it did not occur to me immediately that I would write about times when it had seemed good
It might have seemed best to me then that I should seek out a friend, someone who might be at a loose end, and most enticingly my enterprising friend Roland Browne, with whom for more than a year I had shared a small house. It was with Roland in that house that I had first smoked a bong—inhaling and spluttering and soon afterwards raving. My raving inciting confusion in Roland’s principal companion at that time, Stephen Hurtley, whose confusion soon turned to merriment. Even after Roland took up residence elsewhere, it seemed safe to assume that he had dope stashed away, and that it would be good dope and possibly great dope, and that he would pack me a bong and insist that I smoke it. And I would smoke it and forget about the task undone, or the woman from whom I had hidden my interest.
I might say then things that I never had thought I would say. And I would say these things in ways that assumed much goodwill. I am more able now to recognise how much generosity has been advanced to me, over decades, by Roland and by other people with whom I have smoked bongs. The value of this appreciation has exceeded its price: merely my livelihood, and the inflated self-regard that my visible means of support had abetted. The past year I can recall as a good year, even if it was not a year when, most of the time, I felt good.
It is not obvious to me even now just what drew me to begin reconstructing such occasions of intoxication. My guess is that, having been invited to reflect upon past periods of pleasure, I was reluctant to acknowledge that such periods recently had been few. And so as a way of denying a reward to the invitee—Ms Felicity, as I will call her—I began with a response that I thought very petty. It was not as though my companions and I had spent these times sharing personal problems and solving them. The settings in which we smoked varied but one theme persisted. The question perennially in need of an answer was how many bongs would we have—a question that in any moment reduced to the question whether one of us needed to smoke another bong. Perhaps we were sharing problems, and solving them. It appears from my recent reinhabiting of these moments that commonly it was I who felt he had most at stake when resisting an exhortation that he take another draught of fumes from the giggle-weed, as we described the intoxicant sometimes in those days. Usually we just called it dope. In my small circles it was rarely labelled mere weed, or grass, or pot, or hemp, or marijuana, and even more rarely cannabis, although we thought of cannabis as its botanical name. Hashish was available sometimes. And yet it was not always I who had most at stake when deliberating over whether I would do better to rebuff a suggestion that I attend to a bong, even if I recollect myself as being the most deserving of censure, among those with whom I inhaled, for what I said when intoxicated. Bob Cottleman, arguably, when he was present, had more at stake than I did, for in our company his resistance to smoking became complete. And a fat lot of good that did him—but I pre-empt myself.
How did these occasions proceed, when we would banter for hours over nothing at all? I shall offer a scrap of dialogue that I reconstituted only in February, the eighth month of my enjoined recollecting. I had recalled my having visited Roland, at the cottage he had moved to in the inner suburb of Abbotsford, where he resided with his girlfriend, Debbie Marten, whom he would make his wife. The year of my visit was 1986. Debbie had not been at home, and Roland, as I had hoped, had presented me with a bong, telling me that the batch of dope from which he would fill its bowl had been acquired only recently, and that it was good dope but he was not sure how good. Implicitly, this had invited me to render a judgment. The bong had tasted delicious and I am sure I did not cough from smoking it. I would have taken another swig on my beer.
“How does that feel?” I believe Roland asked, as he gazed at me across a corner of his dining table.
“Nothing. I feel nothing.”
“You feel nothing.”
“Nothing. Nothing at all. I feel nothing. I feel very weird and silly but I feel nothing.”
“It’ll come on soon.”
“I don’t think it will,” I believe I told Roland, rendering my judgment upon this batch of dope. “I think I’ve got used to it already.”
“You probably have. So you can just relax and enjoy it. And then you can have another one.”
“You are not going to get me like that, Roland. You are definitely not going to get me like that. When Steve was here, you might have got me like that. But Steve isn’t here, so you won’t be getting me like that. Probably ever again. You might never get me again like that ever again, Roland. But Steve might have got me like that. Probably would have done. You were a horrible pair, Roland. A horrible pair.”
“We were a horrible pair.” Roland’s intonation was perfectly flat, a mere echo.
“You were a horrible pair. No, I can’t believe I just said that. Of course you weren’t a horrible pair. You were a great pair. A fabulous pair. There was nothing like the pair you were. Oh no. It is bad, Roland …”
“It’s bad that we were a fabulous pair.”
“No. It’s bad that you aren’t a fabulous pair any more. That you aren’t a pair. Any more. I do say terrible stuff sometimes, don’t I.”
“You do say terrible stuff sometimes.”
“But it doesn’t matter, does it. It doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter. Does it?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I believe Roland said. “Well, it does, but there’s not much we can do about it. I’ll have this bong and then you have one and then not all that much will matter, after all.”
“It’s a bong you need to have,” I told Roland.
“I’ll have this bong, and then you’ll have a bong,” Roland said. “That’s what we need. That’s what this is about. I’ll have this bong, and then it’s your turn for a bong.”
“I think you need that bong.”
“I do need this bong.”
“But I don’t need another bong.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. You do need another bong.”
WHEN I reconstituted that conversation, it had been about ten months since my suspension from the sub-editing team at Southern Suburbs Newspapers. I’d been employed by Southern more or less comfortably for twenty-two years, having been taken on with little relevant experience by The Bayside Post about two years before that chain bought it. At the time when I engaged in the reported repartee with Roland Browne, I had no idea that I would be offered a job with the Post, or with any newspaper, and certainly not a job as a trainee sub-editor. Roland’s Abbotsford house had been a single-fronted cottage on Turner Street. Under the influence of my long inhalation, I had been lamenting the death of Steve Hurtley, with whom Roland had pursued many adventures, most connected with the consumption of black-market narcotics. When Steve had been living, I never would have lamented the absence of his uneasy companionship. I had wished that Roland would not allow Steve to so clutter his waking hours. Between Debbie and Steve—and not forgetting the insistent Bob—Roland had been besieged in that period by attention-seekers whose attention to him I received as intrusive. Even when I had lived with Roland, sharing our two-storey terrace house in Keppel Street, Carlton, barely a stone’s throw from the colleges of Melbourne University, there had been scant opportunity for me to commune with him alone. And so when lamenting Steve’s death, some years later at Abbotsford, while communing with Roland alone, I would have been lamenting a loss that I had barely begun to experience as a loss. And I would have been lamenting that loss while confident that it would endure. If Steve had merely moved interstate, or had married a tourist and gone to live overseas, I would not have been telling Roland, even as addled from smoking as I must have been at the time, that it was sad Steve was no longer with us.
