Clinker Bill

Clinker Bill

Bruce Lyman

B

ill was forty three years old when he shaved his legs for the first time. It had never crossed his mind to do this.  Ever. Not that he had any aversion to the concept. In his school days he had a couple of triathlete friends who went into the whole body waxing thing and he understood why. Until now he had felt no impulse to do it himself which was odd for Bill was a tactile sort of fellow, enjoying the feel of the sun on his skin, or the rush of rock foamed water massaging him as he tumbled through rapids to the pool below. As a boy his early excursions into his sexuality had nothing to do with either sex but a curiosity about the sensations created by the elements. The evening he started on his legs he had been reminiscing about those boyhood summer days when he lay barely buried, naked under hot sand, only his head exposed. The remembrance made him tingle and he wondered that it had been decades since he had done anything like it.

Those summer days were running and climbing days. Long days of rabbit shooting and hiking and exploring. The outdoors toned and tempered his fit young body and he once admired his flexed legs and arms, watching the muscle sculpt his skin.  So  there was a slight feeling of shock as he stared at his newly shaved legs.  A healthy white sheen through the suds should not have surprised him. “Haven’t been in the sun for years” he mused.  The familiar childhood spots and scars were still there. What shocked him was not the colour but no matter how much he flexed, his legs would not sculpt. It was a loss that jolted him and which he mourned.    

The loss still nagged him weeks later as he leaped two steps a time up the escalator to the street, on his way to the bank. True he could not run like he once did but he was fit. Surely he was. The sun had dropped but the sky was luminescent ink blue and throwing diamond glints of light up the street in one of those rare moments which warm the sandstone and which photographers, caught outdoors without their cameras, lament. Bill strode along Castlereagh Street, stepping around dark suits rushing home when the bright reds, yellows and blues of a brilliant handbag, artfully perched beside casually discarded high heels, in the same colourful and intricate pattern, caught his eye.

 “If I was a girl I would buy those” he thought and in the same half step wondered why it was that he couldn’t do just that.  He rued he could not walk up the street with the handbag. It appealed to his love of irreverent yet harmonious colour. The sky darkened, the crowds pressed in and he hurried away. Besides, Albert who monitored the gas flow into the flue and checked furnace humidity and moisture levels would somehow find out he owned a handbag. That was his answer to “why not?”

The pressing crowds took his mind off the handbag, and he was weighed down by the thought that he looked no different to all these other burdened people.  Bill trailed a half balding middle aged man in a dark suit who limped along under his own extraordinary weight. His disposition already bordering on glum, he now felt dark and moody.   I am being taken where I don’t want to go and becoming someone I don’t want to be. Van Morrison broke into his head and Brown Eyed Girl pulled him even lower.

Hey where did we go,
Days when the rains came
Down in the hollow,
Playin' a new game,
Laughing and a running hey, hey
Skipping and a jumping
In the misty morning fog with
Our hearts a thumpin' and you
My brown eyed girl,
You my brown eyed girl

He signed the documents and stepped back into the street. Her lips were luscious and the long tangled hair fell carelessly over her face. Tips of teeth barely visible, and an upturned, inviting chin. Bill knew it was the advertiser’s art, the powerful language of sex being used in this oversized poster to sell …? He wasn’t sure exactly since he had moved past so quickly, but his peripheral vision had been caught by the sexual invitation.  He knew he had been suckered but did not blame the advertiser or the model.  He was conscious of a sensuousness that eluded him. A line of lip, a shine of cheek, a glisten of sweat that he would never taste or touch or smell. An loss discovered in the shaving and emphasised now in everything he saw.  In the poster.  By the Chinese couple French kissing behind the raised boot of their BMW in Haymarket. In the shampoo advertising in every hair salon. By the gorgeous models leaving at the end of the day from David Jones, a giggling cluster he was forced to step around.  He put his head down and ploughed on, suddenly conscious of the stubble catching on the cloth of his trousers. 

In the dark evening Bill slowed as he made his way to the train. The bank had knocked the stuffing out of him. Heck, what was he doing there at all? He should be back in the cement factory doing his thing. But an inheritance is an inheritance and needed looking after properly. It required his full attention and that was what he was giving it. Bill, now the sole recipient of a large injection of unencumbered funds, was suddenly more aware of life than he had been since he was a ten year old boy living in the bush where skinny dipping was a summer and autumn pleasure and no one cared if you liked flowers.   

Albert worked the gas, Bill supervised the clinker production in the rotating kiln that ground all day and all night. It was a good, tight team of bloke’s blokes. Men who knew what they wanted and were sure of themselves. Or at least that was what they wanted everyone to think. Bill imagined that was the case with them all. And perhaps they thought that of him. He couldn’t tell. Not really the sort of thing you discussed over the sandwich box was it?  He turned his head to the rumbling roar of the turning kiln that made the clinker that made the cement that made the city that hemmed him in and wondered if it was all worth the worry.

The inheritance sat in the bank for three years. His bankers pleaded with Bill to invest in their funds but Bill feared  once he could not see it only the bankers would. So he left it where it was and read the three line statement that arrived in the mail every month to torment him with possibilities. He took flights of fancy to Morocco. Andra Pradesh.  Tibet. Rio plagued his dreams. Themes of colour and light and texture linked them all.  Early one clear morning in late autumn, with the sky starting to lighten in the pre dawn silver darkness he became vaguely aware of a new passenger boarding the bus at the stop after his. He guessed she was in her mid to late thirties but it was hard to tell in the shadows of the morning. He was engrossed in his newspaper  �" but not so much that he did not notice her fashion sense. Over the next few days she sat closer and closer and she seemed to get clearer and clearer. Always smartly dressed. Soon he was waiting for her to get on, his paper unopened until he had seen what high heels and suit she was wearing that day. Hair neatly done.   There was something of the 1940s about her clothes. Her skirt, of fine wool, came to the knee and her wide lapelled jacket was tied in the middle with a wide and brightly coloured sash. Only her hair suggested a more modern time.

On Wednesday morning Bill was startled to see her walk onto the bus with the purse he had admired in Castlereagh Street all those years ago.  Somehow the purse was clear and brilliant, and in noticing it she also came into sharp focus. She unnerved him as she walked the length of the bus and took the seat beside him. He couldn’t help himself and leaned to her, ever so slightly.

“That is an amazing collection of colour. I saw it in a store in the city and considered purchasing it.”

“For yourself?” Her smile was gentle and Bill, inclined to defence, took no offence.

“Yes” he whispered. “For myself.”

“I am glad you didn’t. There was only one and I was so glad I was able to buy it.”

Bill laughed. “I think it probably looks better in your hands than it would in mine. Chaps at work would think I had gone completely barmy if I turned up with one of these.”

“Not the sort of thing I would take to work Bill. They wouldn’t appreciate it.”

“You are so right.” He leaned back in his seat and briefly contemplated a scene of derision and abuse. Startled he lurched forward and started to open his mouth.

“It’s okay, your name is on your lunch box. Or is it really your lunch box? Maybe Bill is someone else.”

He relaxed back into the seat. “No, that is me alright.  Tell me, did you buy the heels in the matching patterns?” He found himself looking into her face as he asked and the fine patterns of her green eyes and the careful black shading of her lashes caught his breath.  She was going to accuse of him of being too forward.  Any moment now.

It was her time to laugh. “You ask the question as if you will be disappointed if I say that I did. And if I did buy them you might be worried they were the only pair left as well.”

Bill felt a sharp twist in his gut and only responded with a nervous giggle. How well she knew him. He shook his head. “No, shoes would not be for me. Not to wear at least” he added hurredly. But I did fall in love with the lines and the curves and colour. Not unlike…” He paused, embarrassed. He had nearly put his foot in it completely, and they had only travelled three stops together.

“Not unlike this suit? On me?”

“No…no…no. Nothing like that.” Bill was appalled. How could she know? How could she be so forward? He shifted awkwardly towards the window.

“It’s okay Bill. I am happy for you to tell me what you think. I don’t think you could ever offend me. I like these lines myself. Classic aren’t they?”

Bill nodded. This was going way too far and way too fast. He gazed out the window and there was an awkward silence for the next stop or two.  Bill was conscious of a strong flower perfume, the scent of early freesias or daphne carried on crisp, cool, morning air. But the fresh glory of the freesia did not completely obscure the faint acid of damp clothes, as if they had sat in the clothes basket too long before being put out to dry.

Suddenly she was patting his knee. “See you tomorrow Bill. Let’s see if you like the lines and curves of tomorrow’s outfit. She laughed and lurched to the front of the braking bus, alighted and was gone. Bill quickly looked around but no one seemed to be paying any attention.

Soon  Bill’s day never started without the smell of flowers and the beautiful line of a knee length skirt as she came into view at the stairs of the bus.  She was working in a government office she could not tell him about. Bill could care less. Here was someone who understood all the things he loved about fashion and colour. But it was more than that. He shared whispered family secrets with her and laughed at childhood remembrances together. She told him about the life at school and at work though he often wondered she never spoke about her family. They laughed and joked and giggled at each others secrets. Passengers looked strangely at them, especially at Bill. He sometime suspected they were alarmed at their frolicking laughter and noise.  They never frowned at her, only scolded him with their eyes. No doubt they felt he should be more restrained, what with his grey hair and dull overalls. But he felt like a boy again and cared less about what others thought. He whispered his delight at the skinny dipping escapades as a child and his secret desire to capture that carelessness again. She clapped her hands and laughed and said she knew exactly what he meant.  

The morning she did not arrive on the bus was the morning after Bill had been told he was to be made redundant. Maybe he could take that trip to Morocco. Something in his heart told him he could not.  He wanted to ask her. But she was not there. Alarmed, he got off at her stop and walked into the city to her art deco building in Martin Place.

“Are you trying to have a joke sir? No one by that name  has worked here for years. But have a look at the plaque in the foyer. If you are not pulling my leg it may just be of assistance.”

Puzzled, and quite a bit worried Bill made down the stairs to the foyer and found  a loving memory engraved stone calling to mind a certain Jean Hathaway who had, to the deep regret of her colleagues (who missed her so), been killed in a tragic bus accident on the 14 September 1944. Her faded, embedded picture was bounded by Australian flags and blooms of wattle. It was her alright, in her stylish wide lapelled jacket. It took Bill the whole day to walk home. He could not face getting on the bus and he never went near work. Albert had been right all along. She was too good to believe. “You have been inventing her” he would laugh as Bill recounted her witty conversation.  His whispering and talking and giggling had been to empty air as far as his fellow passengers were concerned. What appalling things they must have overheard. And seen.

Police found Bill in his bath. Shaved leg hair floated in the grimy suds and cold grey water �" which hid the pooled blood that had leaked from his body two days earlier.  The iPod still hummed away on repeat. As they made to lift him from the drained bath the ambulance officers gently removed his earphones. The tinny strains of Brown Eyed Girl caught their ears.

Do you remember when we used to sing,
Sha la la la la la la la la la la te da