Mozza was feeling a touch more optimistic. Not much, but
some. He’d driven the sergeant around town for couple of laps and hadn’t run
over anyone so the copper’s face had been saved and so had Mozza’s driver’s
licence. And his hip was having a quiet spell too. Life always seemed brighter
when his hip wasn’t barking. Fifteen years off and on, barking whenever a storm
was brewing or a virus was doing the rounds. Ever since he fell off the TV
mast. Irony was, not long after that everyone started going over to Austar
dishes and no-one needed TV booster masts any more anyway. Didn’t need TV
masts, or Mozza.
He’d struggled ever since. Dragged his bung leg around the
district doing odd jobs and now getting by on the Age Pension, knew it was only
the quiet support of the town that made life bearable. That and his independent
attitude. He mightn’t have always been totally lovable but country towns always
respected an independent attitude. It’s in their DNA.
Five years now he’d grieved for Dixie, and at least once
in each of them he’d taken the .22 out into the Ranges and thought about it.
Thought about Dixie, thought about Death. Usually finished up pinging off a
rabbit for the cat and arriving back home not feeling any better. Or any worse.
Like he was waiting.
But today he woke up with a bit more optimism. Getting
past the new sergeant’s token “Driving Test” thing seemed to help him turn a
corner. Made him feel like humanity was – generally speaking – still on his
side.
He said as much to the cat.
“A few good years left yet Bones – whadda’ya reckon?”
The old grey tom half stirred and went back to sleep. It’d
been the same five years since the cat had adopted Mozza, turned up on his
doorstep the day after the funeral acting like a consolation prize. Mozza
wasn’t superstitious but he could never quite get past the coincidence of it.
So he let it stay on. The two old-timers eventually settled for each other’s
company, fell into a mutually comfortable early morning routine of
kettle-boiling and saucer-milk and yesterday’s paper read at length. And one-sided
conversations.
“You’re not much bloody company at breakfast, are ya’“.
The cat ignored him entirely this time. Mozza poured
himself a fresh cup of tea and watched out the kitchen window as the sun eased
up from behind the low brown line of the Kultaby Hills. Always was a great
view, sharp and clean, full of the promise of the day, and a good feeling
stirred in his tough old frame.
It’d been a while but it was a feeling he recognised.
He’d felt it before a few times over the years, mostly
when a part of his life had ended and a new bit was starting. When the grieving
for what had been and could never come back was done and it was time to move on
to the next stage. Like when he was a kid and his dad never came home from the
war. Like when their baby died and Dixie broke her heart. Like when he lost all
his and Dixie’s hard-earned in the ‘70s Poseidon Mine debacle. Like when he did
his free-fall off the TV tower.
Like when Dixie... when Dixie...
He stirred in the sugar, flexed his shoulders out of their
slump.
Five years of it now, Mozza. Enough already.
It’s time. Today.
Time to do this one more time. Do it or go under. He spoke
to Dixie’s God. The God who was never there for him. Not that he ever expected
the guy to be there anyway.
“Geez mate, I’m seventy-five, I’ve only got this one to go
surely?”
But God didn’t say anything back. Just sat on his
celestial throne and watched him, same as all the other times, like there was a
clipboard and scores involved.
So Mozza gritted his teeth and gave the new day a decent
shot, one more time. Had to be a few brownie points for that, surely.
It didn’t start well.
The girl at the Bank simply said – “No need to teach an old dog new tricks” – just like that, out of the blue. It was an innocent enough remark, one of those throw-away comments you fall back on when you’re stuck for an answer, but it was supposed to be – “You CAN’T teach an old dog new tricks”. The “no need to” variation somehow he took personally. It got right up his nose.
She was about nineteen-and-a-day and youth sparked out of
her in all directions. She click-a-clacked a few bits of his life into her
terminal and in two beeps and a buzz it said it was okay for Mozza to have
three hundred dollars of his own money, said it with its face away from him,
showing this cute kid all sorts of things about him he couldn’t see.
She gave him back his ATM card and counted six fifties out
of her drawer, slid them through. He counted them for himself, put them in his
wallet. She gave him that face again.
“Have you tried to use the ATM yet Mr Klante?” –
then did her Bank PR smile same as she always did. He grunted.
“Nah.”
“Time’s running out – it’s a matter of when, not if -
y’know - when this branch closes. You’ll have to use the ATM then.”
“Yeah? – well, it’s a bloody crime, closin’ country banks. How we
supposed t’do our stuff – I mean – the over the counter stuff?”
“It’s all online, other than cash out, which is at the
ATM. Mr Watson’s explained all this to you.”
He grunted again. Watson was a prat. He’d only been
parachuted in to oversee the wind-up of the branch anyway. As Mozza saw it.
“An’ what would some city bloke know – about the country?”
She ignored the question.
“Or you’ll have to drive down to Paskeville. That’s where
I’m going - when...”
“Guess I’d better run out and buy a bloody computer
then...”, sarcastic and knew it, “...an’ an EYE-phone. Maybe a dongle.”
He had absolutely no idea what a dongle was but he knew it
was pretty technical and went with all the other eye-this and eye-that crap.
She sighed, like running out of patience. That’s when she
dropped it on him.
“Ah well, no need to teach an old dog new tricks I
suppose,” but she was already looking over the top of him, turning up her
sparkle to full bore and smiling her catch-a-footy-hero smile. He was built
like a wheat silo.
“Thank you, Mr Klante. Hi, Greg.”
Mozza felt dismissed. He bought some groceries and headed
for home via the pub even though it was only ten o’clock.
There was a thundery change in the late summer air and now
his hip was starting to ache again. Damn thing made him as niggly as hell when
the weather was brewing up. Niggly and crabby. Well, so Dixie used to say. And
she’d been right. But for once he couldn’t really blame it on his bones. It was
that bloody comment about old dogs and new tricks. Out of the mouths of babes
and all that. WHY can’t old dogs learn new tricks? Who said they couldn’t? Or
shouldn’t? Or shouldn’t NEED to?! He could if he wanted to, he was just being
selective, that’s all. About what new stuff he chose to dive into. And it was
the principle.
But it mulled about in the back of his head like some
unanswered question. It was as if the girl had invented the saying on the spot,
just to see how he’d react. It made him feel he needed to explain something to
her, like about how he didn’t feel old, and that his brain was still
good for new things. Stuff like that. Brain stuff.
He dropped the bag of groceries straight home, skipped the
pub and went round to their flash new Library in their flash new Council
chambers. The town mightn’t have been up to having its own bank anymore and
couldn’t get a doctor to stay more than ten minutes even though they had two
vet practices and a lawyer. But they did have a decent Library. Well, pretty
decent.
“Good morning Mozza, how are you today?”
She was about seventy and a bit. Fifty years ago she’d
still been Bernadette O’Brien and every inch as cute as the kid in the Bank. In
fact way cuter. And she still looked pretty good. Widowhood
rested on her well because Big Jim’d been a bastard and always had been. Even
at school. Mozza and most of the town were pleased she’d seen him off. Yep, she
definitely looked good.
Mozza suddenly had an irrepressible urge to reach out and touch some very
long ago and very shared memories to see if they were still there, to kind of
reassure himself of something.
“I’m okay. But how are you Bobby.”
Caught unawares she blushed just a touch and for an
instant her matronly composure slipped when their eyes connected. It was a long
time since anyone had called her Bobby. In fact only a cocky young shearer from
the Kultaby Hills ever had. The image of her initials cut into the stockyard
rail, and him and her standing there and him with a cheeky grin saying -
“B.O’B. Bob, see? How’s about the dance Sat’day night Bobby?”
She looked down now and made to reorganise a pile of book
returns on the desk. The forms of address had been broken and she wasn’t sure
what was really being said, so she fell back on the safety of convention,
continuing as if he’d correctly said “Good morning Berna - how are you,”
because there are unspoken rules in country towns, that make it possible for
grownups who shared all of the hullos and goodbyes and the fumblings of their
youth to go on living the rest of their lives around each other.
“Are you borrowing or bringing back Mozza?”
He held that grin on her and said nothing.
“Borrowin’ thanks.”
Still she hung on to formality, took up the bar code
zapper thing. He still didn’t make any move and she had to look up. Mozza was
grinning openly.
“I haven’t picked out any books yet Bobby. You zap ‘em on
the way out, don’t ya?”
Now her face flushed a little. She put the zapper down and gave herself
to the small moment of intimacy. The place was empty but for the two of them,
but she lowered her voice a little anyway.
“You always were a bloody liability MOSS-tyn.”
“Yeah - but we had some good times too didn’t we. When are
ya’ going to invite me round for tea?”
She hesitated. She’d been on her own for two years now,
Mozza for five. It was a small town - bowls, CWA, the Hospital Board - she
weighed up the parts of her life, the comfort in the way they currently fitted
together.
“Maybe one day – soon...”, and she softened with it, and
smiled, and nothing more was said.
Mozza shuffled his gammy hip off down to the back shelves.
Made himself feel like it was good to be alive. That it always had been. Well,
most of the time.
He scanned the shelves titled “Electronics”, surprised to
find how much of it was on computers. He’d heard a lot of the young blokes back
from studies in the city had computers out on their farms, but somehow it
caught him unawares to find such a big proportion of the section given over to
them. It was only then that he realised that a whole new age had crept up on
him unnoticed.
The niggly feeling came back.
He took down a nice shiny new book called “Learning To
Love The Silicon Chip”. Smart Aleck title he thought, and sampled a page around
chapter two. It was one of those things written for total idiots. It said
“...requires a fundamental comprehension of the relationship between binary,
decimal and hexadecimal numbering...”, and Fig.2-7(b) showed a 63, a great
string of noughts and ones, and then a 3F. The caption implied that these were
the same value as each other.
The old dogs and new tricks thing bumped around in his
head again. He stuck the book under his arm.
The next one was “Inside the Modern Microprocessor”. There
was a photo of the guts of one of them with assorted tags to various parts that
said “Zilog 38C7A Chip” and “DMA” and “64 Bit Data Bus” and gear like that. It
all looked like crap but he jammed that one under his armpit too.
He kept on idly picking books in and out, backwards and
forwards, feeling as if there was something more he had to find. On a shelf
marked “Nostalgia” he came across a really old book titled “Radio For Boys”. On
the front there was a picture of a 1936-model kid fitted with a set of Biggles
earphones and fiddling with a tuner dial. There were a couple of large glass
valves glowing gently, lighting up the boy’s face, a variable condenser, a
couple of resistors, a transformer, a coil, and some soldered wires clearly
going from one thing to another, all mounted on an open chassis. Inside the
book the plans looked like real wiring diagrams and everything was in a version
of English that he understood.
He took it to the desk sandwiched between the hexadecimals
and the zilog chips.
Bernadette liked volunteering at the Library. What the
locals selected was a small window she never tired of peeking through. And she
enjoyed the conversations over what they’d found when they returned them. But
Mozza had always been a man apart. And not really a big reader. In fact she’d
never seen him borrow a book.
“Got your card there Mozza?”
“Card? What card?”
“Your library card.”
“Nah – never had one. Another bitta damn plastic I hafta
have?”
“Yes – sorry.”
“Geez, what next!”
“Look, I’ll put these on mine for you, but you’ll need to
come in and get Julia to issue you...”
“Sure – sure – thanks...”
Bernadette wasn’t often surprised by what people took out,
but her eyebrows got away from her as she zapped his, and she even paused at
the boy in the Biggles gear, a twitch of a smile waiting in the corners of her
mouth.
Mozza just looked at her like - what a man reads is his
own business - and said see ya’ later.
At home he skimmed the first two and tossed them aside,
took up the old one.
The first half was on crystal sets and the second half on
primitive valve radios, while the last chapter was on a serious-looking full
blown 240 volt four-valver with a speaker instead of headphones. Memories
flooded back out of the pages. Mozza had made a few crystal sets when he was a
kid, even made one for Dixie when they were first married and stuck out on the
dog-fence. AND didn’t have two bob bits to rub together. But it’d been useless,
never likely to pull in anything but static let alone the ABC. He’d even strung
up a monster aerial but without electricity he was stuffed.
But Dixie’s dad had always said that Mozza had “The Gift”. What he meant
was that Mozza was one of those blokes that was good with his hands. As long as
he could SEE the connection between all of the parts of a thing he could make
it or mend it or improve on it. And he was mostly right.
But in reality Mozza always had trouble with invisible
things like radio. He’d always managed to avoid fiddling with them too much
over the years, but his trick was that anytime he found an old wireless set at
the dump he’d pull it apart and keep all of the pieces, so he always had boxes
and boxes of parts in his shed. It was only a matter of continually replacing
each valve or condenser or resistor one at a time till he hit the problem. And
never let anyone watch him fix their wireless.
But the truth was, he didn’t really understand any of it.
So he always carried a bit of a secret inferiority complex when it came to
“electronics”.
Now it all seemed to have come back to him, that whole
feeling of - inadequacy.
He leafed through the book for a few hours that afternoon,
reading the complicated bits out loud to the cat several times till he reckoned
he had the idea of it. Dixie watched him from the mantleshelf. She was smiling
that small wise smile of hers. Mozza went out to the shed, the cat in tow.
He took down every box of parts he had and sorted through
them till he had one of everything that the big four-valve plug-in mains-power
plan called for. Or the nearest thing to it that he could find. Then he made a
small plywood box base and mounted all the pieces with much soldering and
mumbling. The cat patiently watched from the end of the bench.
It was nearly eight o’clock that night before he was
finished. He stood back and stretched loudly, stirring the cat from its dozing.
He felt just a little bit pleased with himself. It really did look a lot like
the one on the front cover of the book.
Full of renewed confidence in ‘The Gift’, Mozza plugged it
in and switched it on. It let go one great violet greenish sszzzZZZZAPP!!
and every fuse in the place blew out. Cat and man and radio jumped in different
directions as the world went a very sudden and very silent shade of black.
His renewed confidence rattled just a fraction, Mozza
found the shed torch, replaced all of the fuses and had some tea. He re-read
the book that night and next day tried again.
Version Two made a much tamer white sszZZAP! and only blew
out the fuses in the shed. Versions Three and Four just sat there and did
nothing. Dumb lumps of stony dead. Version Five finished up all over the back
wall.
A couple of days later all three books went back. He
thought stuff it, who needs this sort of aggravation. Electronics is for
soft-handed techno-prats.
But it was too late. He was caught. It coloured his
thoughts for a week, wouldn’t give him any peace. Every time he shut his eyes
he could see that twelve year old kid gloating in the reflected glow of his
valves all ticking over the way they were surely meant to.
The next Saturday morning he took his nice new zapper card
to the Library and borrowed the book again. He could see Berna was dying to
ask.
He skimmed through it a couple of times over lunch,
convinced himself that he must have wired the transformer in wrong way round
and went out and knocked up Version Six, plugged it in and defiantly switched
it on. It vibrated a bit, trying to get going. Mozza helped it along with a
scientific poke here and there with the screwdriver, and -
WHACK!!
Multiple voltage kicked up his arm and backpedalled him
into the side of his ute with a thud. Dazed, he slumped down onto his haunches
and checked out his blackened screwdriver, the action of his arm joints, and
felt for his heart. It had a good healthy gallop going. The cat squatted
alongside of him. It looked at him with a geez mate you sure you’re up to all
of this? Mozza conceded defeat. The book went back again that afternoon. Berna
didn’t comment. But he could see she was gagging to.
For two weeks he did a bit of gardening, serviced the ute,
mended the roof of the chook-house, all the time whistling tunelessly through
his teeth. Any fool that didn’t know him would’ve thought some wisdom and
acceptance had come to the old man. But deeper things were involved.
One Monday morning he just stopped what he was doing,
stared off into the distance for a while, and then set about putting the thing
to rest.
Berna couldn’t hold her curiosity any longer when he
checked the book out yet again.
“Who’s winning, Mozza?”
His face went tight and she could see she’d touched some
really raw nerve end. She quickly grabbed at words to reassure him of her kind
intentions.
“Would you - like to come over for tea tomorrow night?”
Mozza never failed to be impressed by the intuitive nature
of some women. Most women.
“Ah, yeah - thanks Berna, that’d be nice - thanks,” and he
took the book with a soft nod and a bit of a smile.
This time he really read it. REALLY read it. Digested it.
Mulled over each mystery and weighed every word. The cat got sick of listening
to the lengthy discussions on the probabilities of where they’d got it wrong.
But at least Mozza learnt not to muck around with 240 volts. He bought a set of
torch batteries and went for one of the two-valver earphone jobs in the middle
of the book.
Then it was back to the shed and out with the boxes again.
Too many more disasters and he wouldn’t have enough parts to fiddle with.
He worked quietly and carefully on it all morning, some
tense, threatening sense of limitation ever lurking at his elbow, waiting to
make its point.
Finished, he went and made a cup of tea, then a sandwich,
then washed up his cup and plate. He couldn’t stall any longer. He went out to
the shed and switched it on.
The valves gently lit up, a faint but steady hum drumming
in the plywood base. It had a soft life to it. Mozza listened at one earphone -
background mush, the distant noises of a breathing universe, sounds he
remembered. He clipped the earth and aerial wires in place, put the earphones
on and slowly turned the tuner knob looking for life. All he could hear was his
own pulse bumping away steadily.
Suddenly a fragment of a voice went by. He backed up, hand
trembling. Radio waves zeroed in out of the air and down the aerial, were
de-coded and re-coded and organised into reality, and before dropping back down
into the earth, they spoke into Mozza’s ear.
“.... and you mean to tell me that the Honourable Member
for Molong was too busy to get off his over-stuffed behind (Order! Order!)
and have a decent look at this truly appalling case of electoral mismanagement
...” - or something like that.
Mozza smiled. Then a funny little involuntary snigger got
away from him. Then he laughed. And laughed. Laughed and laughed till his chest
hurt and tears ran down his face and his nose dripped and heaps of stored-up
things were gone.
The cat looked at him with some uncertainty.
Mozza finally got his composure back, sniffing and wiping
his eyes on his shirt sleeves. He tuned it on a little further, hesitated at
some bloke reading out the latest share market trends, shook his head with a
sort of ironic smile and kept searching. Music trickled in.
It was one of those pretty little piano pieces. Classical
stuff. The sort of thing that Dixie would’ve loved. He stood there with his
eyes shut and his arms folded, soaking up the sound, drifting away on it, not
moving until it was finished. Then he slowly took off the earphones,
disconnected the set and took it in the house. With the dampness still in the
corners of his eyes he sat it alongside Dixie’s photo on the mantelshelf. It
just looked like an upended cigar box with half a dozen very old wireless bits
stuck on it.
But Dixie would’ve understood.
It was then
that it dawned on Mozza Klante, that she probably always had.