The Bridges of Perjure

There are only two bridges leading into Perjure. The first of these, should one stick to a strict chronology is so old that it can scarcely be regarded as anything more than a museum piece, should a museum ever be constructed large enough to house such an edifice. It is called variously The Old Bridge, the Clamour, or the Petecross. It has never been modified for modern traffic, some blame the various councils for this, others the populace's apathy. It is worth noting that the Collective of Fiddlers' Grand Meeting Hall is built on the Southern side of the Old Bridge.

The second bridge is a single span steel structure, built in 1972, it is simply called The Bridge.

These Promises are Teeth

These promises are teeth. Hungry, he thought, but still hard. He'd never collected promises in a drawstring bag before, and they rattled.

Promises.

These promises - rattling on the bus, in the bag - loud enough to draw attention. His long fingers, nails bitten to the quick, played constantly at the drawstring.

Where are we going, promises?

He knew where they were going. He had bought the ticket, it curled in his pocket, warm with his warmth.

It was an arduous journey. Sweaty people, all that flesh compacted in a vehicle that stopped and started, stopped and started, so frequently that it never seemed to get up a good head of speed, all those smells, food and fart, and their conversational equivalents. By the end of it, 19 hours in, entering the city at night, he had become one of those sweaty people, and just a little manic. He found himself laughing at the strangest things, the ragged hairdo of the bookish boy in seat 18B, the white bit of thigh of the lady in 16A. He found himself rattling the bag, and all those rattling promises, and laughing.

He got off in the rain.

You ever been in the rain with a bag of promises? You ever marched through the city, your face broad with a 19-hour smile? You, ever done that shit?

He found the hill in the dark, stumbling in the rain and the dark. He sat on a bench, looking up at the hill. And he opened the bag. Stared inside.

These promises rattled.

Out. Out.

One after the other, they rattled and tumbled and wondered how they had ever managed to fit inside the bag. They felt significant, these promises. They grew slick in the rain. They caught the streetlight.

He touched them, each one, with his chewed on fingertips. He measured them. He observed them. They were hard and they were meaningful, and they were slick. He hesitated.
Children. Children. He whispered. You're things that should be forgotten. You're things that daren't be. You're the soft caress of lips. You're the hard hope, and the long pause between glimmering and dream.

Of course they were.

These promises.

He left them on the bench.

He scrunched the bag tight in his pocket, and ran, the drawstring, both ends, flapping and flopping, reaching out from his pocket, reaching back like the stringy arms of a stringy mother bear to a lost cub, reaching back to toothy promises gleaming in the rain.

Coaldrake Mention

Coaldrake Mention sat in his office, hunched over papers, and photographs of teeth in little plastic bags.

Rain outside, storm tapping it across the window like deliquescent morse code; the little heater at his feet humming, and him breathing fumes electrical and plastic. No wonder he had a headache. You get some days that are pure headache, and from first waking, maybe even last dreaming, you know it, and it doesn't argue with your expectations, just proves them over and over. QED.


He straightened the papers. Today was a damn migraine.


Phone rang, he didn't much care to answer it. The phone didn't much care to stop ringing.
Sighed, at last, lost to the jangling phone. Couldn't even outwait its bells and troubles.


And it was trouble.



"Yes."


"Mr Mention?"


"Yes."


"Sorry, Mr Mention. I have no doubt that you are busy, but he said you would help me."


"Who said?"


The name was one that could not be denied. Someone he owed far too much, and far more than his word. QED. The day said.


"What's your problem?"


"The Fiddlers."


Of course it was. QE fucking D.

The tyranny of cranes.

The city is strung on cranes, or appears to be, they jut above the skyline, so many that it is hard to tell what purpose some of them serve. There are cranes apparently suspending towers in the sky. And then there are cranes that rise above mute pits in the ground, that swing and lift, that operate continuously, though nothing ever seems to be built. Get too close, or so the rumours go, and a sniper might find your throat. Get too close and your last sight, as you tumble, down, down, down, might be a pile of bones, and rotting things yet to give up their meat, and crows -- their beaks crack, crack, cracking against flesh and harder matter -- because crows are rather fond of carrion, and, beneath that writhing fluttering mass, skulls looking up senselessly, dead-eyed or empty of eye. And every one of them understanding that tyranny of cranes.

After work today

After work today. With 8 tedious hours behind a smiling mask. Went out for drinks. Wore cords. Which was a mistake. With every step they made rubbery sighs. Who wants to be reminded that they are wearing cords? Who wants to suggest that they might have fat thighs?

I smoked, and I hardly ever smoke, except when I'm uncomfortable, or clutching for some sort of glamour. Smoke and rain, what the fucking hell is cooler than smoke and rain?
Jack was there. And he's cooler than me - smokes more casual. And he'd nodded over his beer, over the balcony and at the distant hill.

"You ever been up there at night?"

I shake my head. Getting up there means effort. The road's gone bad, there's no public transport out that way, and the city's growth is all directed somewhere else these days.

"Fucking know what you mean. But if you ever do. I've heard things. There's a cave and it goes for a while, a long while, and then there's a door and it leads somewhere."

Where does it lead?

"Just somewhere."

And I'm interested. Piqued and all.

But he just laughs.

"They say you can hear music, beyond it. They say, but I've never known anyone who has."

Talk moves to other things then and I forget about that odd place, exchange its memories for another couple of pints of beer and the various bullshits it pulls out of us. Jack knows how to talk, I smoke until my guts churn and then I walk home, because I cannot afford the fare.

It's spring and the cranes loom, then drift into the distance and the inner suburbs parade their old buildings crammed at base or pinnacle of undulations between units. In the dark, or the half-light, they look like mausoleums, and along the powerlines possums scurry, swift, running to war or to root, or whatever the sky drives them to.

This is my city and my lament, but it is the only city I have ever known and I do not seek to rage against it with words like some old writers who feel their youth an Arcadia. Mine was all heat, in a middle of nowhere town, behind mountains, the earth cracked, the roads straight as sin. The city was always bones and ruin. That's what cities are, they can't help it, because that's what we are.

Gotta get up early.

When I pass the cemetery, I see her. A camera in hand, snatching the city out of light and the air. She doesn't see me. But I see her there, and she burns the insides of my eyes like a photograph. She burns the insides of my eyes so that I know I will not forget her. She burns the insides of my eyes and I know it's important.

And I'd be brave and speak to her, but all my mouth can say is - Wo-
- Wo-
- Wo-

What halfwit thing is that?

Jack went home with someone. Pretty. A crooked smile and a wry laugh.

I went home to vomit and to dry retch.

I crawl into my spinning bed, arms wrapped around a bucket like it is an old lover, arms wrapped around a bucket like it will carry me to safety or pleasant dreams.
And it does neither. Just stinks of my spew like an accusation.

I have to get up early.

I don't, because I don't sleep. I get up early alright. Because I am already up.

Dress in my work uniform, knot the tie against my vomit-agitated Adam's apple, pull my crumpled trousers up over spotty legs and stale underpants, tuck in my shirt, curse the morning for the night before, curse the night before because it never promised this.

Photogirl 1

Once there may have have been a certain heroism in the city; a satisfaction of construction, creation out of which the city grew, that first creative moment, the first building to rise above the single-storeyed miscellany, the grids of street and their namings - old kings and villains and professions.

But now the city grew, carried on its own inertia, plunging ceaselessly, into the future, and there was nothing great or grand in this senseless growth.

Its businesses ran with the sere expectation of profits, knowing full well that such things came at the expense of jobs lost, efficiency reduced -- for it is better to mollify efficiency than profit(they are not the same thing). They cowed their staff, set unreasonable targets (so they could paint them on their employees) and demanded to know why these targets were not met.

There was a tyranny of cranes, of dust and machinery, of building pits caged in steel and lit at night with a dreadful brightness.

She thought it beautiful. And almost every waking hour -- of which there were many -- she sought to capture it.

She brought the camera at an op shop, quiet cheaply, not even expecting it to work, but it did.

It was the end of the age of film.

People wanted to know why she took pictures in such an archaic way, seemed offended by it, or sorry for her. But it did not worry her. In fact that was the one thing that did not disturb her.

She was a mass of contradictions, calamities had made her, whittled away, until she stood, a new sprung thing made of old doubts and fears.

She lived alone with her camera and her dark room, and her collection of sharp things, which she used to cut. And she would watch the blood splutter and blubber from her. And she would watch the blood splash. And she would feel the hurt that she had made - all by herself - and the sometimes, if she was not careful the awful, scary terrible scar, that in a minute or two would have her calling a friend, or the ambulance, but for a moment was pure bliss, because she had made it, had released her demons a little, had watched them splatter, and spatter; bloody tears neither miserable nor joyous upon her clean floor.

And no matter what happened afterwards, she would have that moment - swift as it was to fade - and it was like a drug to her, and it tracked her skin as terribly as any drug.

But she had that moment.

There was always some new anxiety. Her lovers - and she took many - would laugh at them, before succumbing to their own. Perjure is a city of anxieties.

The only time she was truly unaffected, artless, was when she peered through the viewfinder, making art stripped the mask from her face.

Collective of Fiddlers

The fiddle is a curious instrument, difficult in its construction, tuneful only with effort, and more likely to sound like a cat being tortured than anything melodious.

The Collective of Fiddlers was a whole whining chorus of mistreated moggies. A ferociously miserable and high-strung cabal of cats. Peculiarly the collective shared the utter inability to recognize their mutual awfulness. Many a fine fiddler, new to Perjure, had sought them out. None had ever managed to pass through the threshold of their grand meeting hall, and even that was at risk of bleeding ears, and ground-bloody lips. They were so incredibly dire, but that didn't mean they were unpopular.

Oh, no, they were very popular, indeed. The Collective's diary was always busy, with this appointment, or that. They played in all the great halls, Opera Theatres, and performance spaces of Perjure. The simple reason being that no more effective method of pest control has ever been invented. A single performance and every rodent, roach and mite would be gone, leaving only a stench of terror (quickly removed with a light fragrance- lavender being the most popular).

Which was how the Collective became the most powerful of artistic (not just musical) groups, their coffers always full, and their interests expanding because, while none of them could play a single pleasing note, every single player knew good investments from bad.

In Perjure you don't piss off a fiddler, especially if they cannot play.