Ordinary days
It was a very ordinary day in a very ordinary town. Beanmont wasn’t a metropolis. It was a sleepy town on the outskirts of a city. Nobody bustled anything. Nobody wanted a fuss. Especially on a Saturday. Saturday was for leisure, sport, gardening or, for those who worked during the week, shopping day. Shopkeepers determinedly shut their doors at the stroke of midday and no-one ever asked for late night shopping.It was just another Saturday. I set out with my shilling and pence jingling in my pocket, headed circuitously to the hot bread shop which would be shut by 9. After all, they started at 4, so they could knock off early. In my large family, I was not the bread winner - I was the bread fetcher. It was my job to bring home sliced white bread.
In those days you had to say whether you wanted it sliced or not. And what colour. Brown bread was kind of lumpy and I am sure the brown was fake. Nobody bought supermarket bread, unless you had chooks or were too lazy to get to the hot bread shop on time. Everybody knew it was cardboard.
I skipped up the road past the Anglican Church. God had blessed the congregation with a huge church and even larger grounds. My father called them “bloody papists” which was confusing, since the papists were across town in the Catholic sector. Anyway, whether they were papists or had a huge building, the pigeons still shat on their spire, turning the copper into streaky lime green. Seems God may have had a sense of justice.
I had laid my own turd their once. I was often distracted on the way home and, one day, I held too long to a distraction, creating a panic in my bowels. I knew I would not make it home and the last thing I wanted was for my mother to scold me about an enormous poo in my undies. So I dived into the hedge that surrounded the papist monument, whipped down my pants and dropped a mighty nugget into an unsuspecting bush. I’m sure the vicar’s wife had a good view of my misdemeanour.
That day was more ordinary than usual. The first dry gusts of early summer brought a shimmer to the road. You had to walk on the footpath now, because we only went barefoot.
On a Saturday, I should have seen only a handful of people going about their business. Today, the numbers were all wrong. Sure, people were going about their business, but there was just too many. It seemed as if the whole town had left their shopping to Saturday. I might have known then that this was not ordinary. But I had concocted a theory that there was some sort of festival on that everyone had attended and now they were just adding shopping to their outing.
Beanmont was in the flightpath of planes from Sydney to Brisbane. On lazy summer days, you could lie on the grass and peer up at the tiny slivers that made a huge white mark across the sky. I think when I looked up, I expected to see something like this. I looked up because I heard a jet engine, quite low. I expected to see a passenger plane in distress and began creating my story of the heroism of the pilot who lands the plane on the high school oval.
But this was not a passenger plane - a familiar TAA or Ansett DC-9. This was some sort of large military jet.
It was not uncommon for us to see military aircraft flying low. On occasions, Hercules from the Amberley base flew a long circuit around the town. They flew so slowly that I sometimes thought they would simply plunge to the earth, but apparently, this slow flight capability was what made them so successful.
This ‘jet’ was flying just as slow, but it was very low. And odd. For one, it had no tail. Where the tail should have been, it had a large jet outlet from which the loud noise emanated. And something else was wrong. When you looked at it, it flickered like old TV sets would.
It circled again. Now, all those people were looking up. There was an audible buzz of consternation. On the second round, something very un-ordinary happened. Very suddenly, the plane transformed into a familiar DC-9, but with the Pan Am livery. What? Pan Am in Australia? This was beginning to be very confusing.
In its final circuit, the ‘pane’ transformed once again, but this time it was clear. A very large foreign object, replete with gushing fire and weird machinery whirring, was hovering in the sky. Nobody on the ground was now going about their business. All the focus was on this strange craft.
We had all read the stories of UFOs and had sceptically assigned them to fantasy. Nothing is more unnerving than fantasy becoming real. Give me poops in the bush or pigeons shitting. That would have been comfortable.
My guess every person created their own version of the “take me to your leader” scenario. For me, I wasn’t really sure who the leader was. How would one retrieve the Prime Minister to satisfy the invaders?
In the archetypical way of UFOs, this machine shot across the sky to the horizon to the west, disappearing over the horizon. But nobody moved. The stunned silence signalled that this was something that would take quite some creativity to recount to relatives.
But the short-lived silence was truncated by a tremendous explosion beyond the horizon. The huge glow was as we imagined an atom bomb, but without the mushroom. As quickly as they had disappeared, the ‘machine’ was back. This time, it had purpose. We were herded into a group at the centre of town. The town was unceremoniously levelled to the ground with huge machines and a new, bright village, complete with lush green areas with wandering animals, a tinkling stream and flying taxis was built, layer upon layer, like a large cake.
We became aware that this utopia was for us. I’m not sure how I knew. Perhaps some kind of mind communication had occurred. But we had to each stand in a queue and be reviewed for our suitability. As we approached the ‘desk’, a miniature ‘person’ suspended on the end of a long rod spoke to us of our registration and our obligations.
It began to dawn on me that we were being generously treated to some kind of intergalactic charity whereby our shabby lives would be transformed by all sorts of salubrious formations. These ‘aliens’ had come to ‘save’ us.
But, once again, this new ‘reality’ seemed a little fuzzy. Some of the houses ended up with no doors. In other places, house were accidentally piled two high. Some of the koalas had fierce sabre teeth. The creek was infested with sharks.
Clearly, the effort towards our salvation was a little flawed. A nice try, but not quite perfect in execution.
I suppose I had never been one to just ‘let it go’ when aliens invaded, so I began to complain to the ‘mini human things’ that some aspects of our new town left a bit to be desired. Naturally, the response was swift and apologetic. The sharks and koalas lost their teeth and several dozen houses were ‘erased’ and re-created.
A certain amount of anxiety exuded from the aliens. Somehow, my bold complaints had struck a chord of concern. I was ushered into a ‘portal’, not unlike a sewer manhole. There was little to observe about this portal except that it moved me instantly to another location, presumably on earth. I did immediately recognise the town a little further to the south - Farquhar. Here, the mini bodies proclaimed a great masterpiece. Indeed, this was a Farquhar without blemish.
As I gazed up at the new impressive utopia, I had an uneasy feeling. I could not put my finger on exactly what the cause might be. All seemed well and people came and went and the flying taxis took off and landed. But none approached me and my delegation of miniatures. And, for some reason, I could not see further than the first street.
As I moved towards the town, it became clear that the whole town was completely two-dimensional. Houses were paper thick and, as you walked past them, disappeared and then reappeared in ‘back’ view. Sure, you could wander among the ‘cardboard cut-outs’ but between was nothing by bare ground. When I spoke to the townspeople, if I stood at an ‘angle’ to the flat, they were spooked and looked about anxiously. Only when I was standing directly on, perpendicular to their plane, did they see me.
I engaged a lady who seemed quite desperate. “I can’t seem to find my sister’s house. Since we were transformed, I can’t find my way about.”
Once again, my protestations to the mini-humans was met with a flurry of activity to add an additional dimension. The effect was quite comic. In their haste to ‘rectify’ the town, MC Escher style contortions emerged, where roads led to the rooves of houses and ‘down’ had been misinterpreted and flying taxis now hurtled vertically on what they perceived to be horizontal, plunging into the solid ground.
The chaos was simultaneously hilarious and frightening. My minders quickly hustled me into another convenient portal. As I looked back, the town was been rapidly transformed back to its original state before it was ‘fixed’.
We emerged into what appeared to have been a successful transformation. This was the larger town of Tarooma. Although endowed with great ‘improvements’, the town was still recognisable, even if only by the tall town hall that dominated from the highest point.
Now somewhat accustomed to the new mode of being ‘shown around the handiwork’, I followed a perfectly formed track through a small grove of trees, complete with chirping birds and appropriate fauna. Thus far, no complaints.
It took some seconds to sink in. Some of the ‘corners’ of objects was jagged, as if a straight line was not possible on the diagonal. I cast about for some kind of explanation. Then came a moment of revelation. This entire creation was like an enormous Lego creation. There were no ‘smooth’ edges. Everything was ‘pixelated.’ The clock on the town hall did not have a round face and the hands zig-zagged from the centre.
My protestations were met with a deadly silence. Confusion? Then, one mini-human asked the question. “What do you mean?” No matter how I explained the jagged world to them, I was met with bafflement. There excited conversations reached a shrill peak.
There was a short pause and then they were gone. Tarooma resumed its ‘normality’, the clock was again round, the embellishments removed and I was left in the middle of town wondering how I would get home.