8:30 AM. A house devoid of any other human life. The floorboards creak and ghostly wind rustles even more cliches through the trees, they are cliches because they are true. That’s exactly how to describe them. The creak is from the cats that have appeared because according to the routine, someone’s going to be eating soon and they might get to lick the plate in the sink afterwards. Cats are the auditors of the animal kingdom.
“Ahem. You made coffee before making toast today. This is different and I do not like it, so I will meow at you. I hope this trend does not mean that you will not stroke me after eating and before the shower. That would be most unpleasant.”
The kitchen has pink cupboards, by the way, and white (grey) linoleum floors and a reddish-pink plastic and metal table straight from the Post-War Australia boom. I can see the outlines of a bustling 1960s mum listening to the wireless while preparing a feast for her screaming kids and angry, possibly alcoholic, husband (who has a bowler hat and is reading a newspaper). They aren’t ghosts, they are memories that probably never even happened. Today it has one man (boy?) making toast and instant coffee with cats swarming around his feet. Meanwhile, as seen through the single kitchen window, the wind has blown someone’s shirt off the hill’s hoist and into a puddle. It doesn’t matter because it has been raining steadily for the past 24 hours anyway. This is probably why the cats are particularly affectionate today: they are bored and can’t play outside.
After showering the boy who likes to think that he’s a man loads up one of the two computers that aren’t his (like almost everything around him) and immediately signs into facebook, opens a new tab to check emails and then a third tab to a job hunter’s website. This is the morning routine. Sip coffee, laugh at an immature joke, archive spam, write a cover letter to a company that won’t ever be read, pretending to be someone who might be successful and, sip coffee. However, today is different. Today the boy who would be a man is packing his bag full of hopeful resumes that will never be read and is going to Melbourne.
Tracey Chapman is singing about fast cars and then Tegan Quin mentions that “it’s a little cold outside”. It is still raining outside but the boy has a scarf, that isn’t his, so he is warm.
He doesn’t waste money on the tram. Nobody checks tickets anyway because nobody buys them. If the occasional officer who hates himself comes along then surely someone else will be caught without one before him. Or he’ll get to his stop in time. It always happens this way. That’s the routine.
Flinders Street Station.
The boy begins to stroll down the Yarra River, asking wherever he can for someone to give him money on a regular basis for in return for completing some meaningless chore that he would probably hate. He passes men in suits and women in heels and people jogging in the rain, desperately trying to hold on to their youthful bodies. Meanwhile people who have held on to their youthful bodies (at what personal cost), jog next to them, yelling encouragement and trying to have a conversation with that they are stuck with because there’s nothing else to do.
Southern Cross Station.
A woman in a blue uniform is sweeping water all over the floor. So it doesn’t form puddles. The boy muses that he could do that. Anyone could do that. They just didn’t get picked, for better or for worse. The woman looks like she hates herself, a shame. In the department block with “hundreds of specialist stores” the boy is told hundreds of times to apply online. He probably already did it this morning. He leaves and heads down Collins Street where men in suits keep bumping into him because they are everywhere. It is probably “lunch”, although it feels more like 5:00 PM, if you get what I mean. Elizabeth street feels deserted after the previous gauntlet, maybe the artist didn’t have the scope to see both directions or maybe that’s the difference between lunch time and 5:00 PM.
Melbourne Central Station
“Hi, I was wondering if you guys were hiring.”
“Yep, if we are then the best place to go is actually our website. We do all our applications online now.”
“No worries! Thanks for your help”
“Have a good day!”
“You too!”
“Desperate, jobless bum.”
“Two-faced Bitch.”
The boy isn’t upset, he just looks sad because of the rain. It is impossible to be upset when you’re surrounded by ancient streets and the wind, blowing memories across the city and into the suburbs. That’s where the boy is now, he’s on a computer again making sure that all the places he went to have his details. They probably just get emailed straight into a bin. That’s where all the resumes that he collected when he had a job went.
Seemingly fed up with the routine of failure. The boy who is a man but thinks he doesn’t deserve it sends a few letters to places that he thinks will never read them. He is different this time.
“To whom it may concern,
I am amazing.”
The next day he wakes up to the same routine but pauses when he reaches the “open a tab to check emails” stage.
There are two letters in reply.
The general purpose of one is, “We weren’t really hiring but please come in for an interview.”
The other one is better, even if the news isn’t so good.
It was polite because the woman wanted to be. It was personal, not automated. It suggested that, out of 1000 resumes, one person actually read it with interest, even though she didn’t need to because she wasn’t hiring.
For 3 minutes, the little house with the same routine was the happiest place that the world has ever known.
The cats had no idea what to do.
