Closer Than They Appear

[Non-fiction]

On my screensaver, the random word of the day is ‘resuscitate’, and I’m thinking, ‘this goes with this goes with this goes with that… ’

It’s like a women’s clothing commercial.

I recall the image of the heavyset cop on his knees, trying to push life back into the limp body of Tyrone Lee Slemnik, who lay on his back on the grass verge down the road from our house.

And I remember the cop who’d taken my statement at the police station; a very business-like woman in her late twenties.

God, I thought, I’m already talking in statement-speak, identifying people by their age bracket and occupation…

She’d noted everything down, but with a practised hand had pared my subjective associations back to something concrete.

It wasn’t even her office. As she was taking my story, she’d been grumbling about computer macros taking more time to set up than they actually saved. A male detective had returned from taking my wife’s statement, and he was helpfully offering to give my statement-taker a lift home. They weren’t even from this department – they’d been moved over from Maroubra to help out with the workload produced by the drive-by shooting.

She slid the printout of my statement across the table before me, raising her eyebrows in a professional manner – completely controlled in her tight-fitting grey two-piece suit. She wanted me to sign it so they could call the job done.

I read over it as quickly as possible, all too aware I was holding everyone up. Without my usual instinctive knee-jerk assumptions, the statement looked pretty bland. It was a sad, fragmentary viewpoint of someone too self-involved to have noticed that he was living close by to a bikie gang who were dealing drugs in the area.

I was no eyewitness to the actual crime, so instead the female detective was trying to get me to remember someone I’d seen hanging out the front of the apartment block down the street where the killing occurred. Halfway through reading my statement I was struck with uncertainty. Stretching the limits of my memory, was it possible I’d been fleshing things out a bit too much?

Was this the description of the actual guy, or was this Ron Pearlman in Sons of Anarchy?

Memories criss-crossed in an indistinguishable mass of associations. I was talking about a glimpse of someone from six months ago who I never knew would be important, for Christ’s sake, and they wanted me to describe him?

How reliable could it possibly be?

I was forced to admit the details were pretty inaccurate. She didn’t exactly rollher eyes; she was too much of a professional for that.

I sat there in the chair, my hand hovering over the paper to sign, and began to wonder how much of it was real.

I mean, how could I have missed it?

I’d seen a few heavy dudes around the place, but so what? I don’t judge books by their covers, or bikies by their jackets. There was the occasional fight I’d heard about, and even a couple of late night burnouts. Nothing that couldn’t have been attributed to a little suburban repression, a bit too much beer, a few too many carcinogens in the soil, one or two smokes missing from the full pack of corporate bullshit, whatever. People got frustrated in this wannabe-democracy of ours.

I read the lines she had taken down describing the shots as they rang out, so inconceivably close to where my son lay sleeping.

I remembered my odd lack of surprise; the moment of complete ridiculousness I’d felt when I stifled the urge to tell my pregnant wife to ‘GET DOWN!’ like she was an extra in Die Hard.

Then the shots had kept going and I knew it was real. It was serious. Someone was getting shot out there – right in my street – and there was bugger all I could do. There had been a wall between my wife and the street, and a wall protected my son too, but it was impossible to tell where the shots were coming from, at what angle, away from or towards… I considered investigating, but all the lights were on in my house and if I peeked out between the blinds someone might see me. I stood in the hallway, perspiration breaking out on my palms. From where I had been sitting in the front room, I had heard the car idling outside, the unmistakable purr of a V8. Every part of me wanted to pick up a brick from the front yard and throw it through the car window. I wanted to shout unintelligibly at them, to scare them as much as they had scared me. I wanted to mark them in whatever way I could to make it easier for the police to track them. I wanted to show them that they couldn’t just drive up to someone and kill them whenever they wanted to.

But I didn’t do any of those things.

Instead, I spent about five minutes looking for my bloody phone in a panic, and by the time I’d found it and dialled ‘000’ it was only to discover it had already been called in – presumably by the guy I saw as I walked out of my house, phone in hand, who was at that precise moment standing over the body of his friend.

The assailant’s car had already roared off.

No hero awards for me. Still reading over my statement, I was distracted by the fact that it was pretty obvious the male cop wanted to get moving.

He was off the clock. Let’s call him ‘Ed’.

My vague meanderings had meant it had taken hours to complete my statement. Ed told me he had a kid who was born within a few days of mine. I finally signed the form, thanking the female cop for her patience. I muttered something to Ed about him having his hands full and he cheerfully agreed – the epitome of the happy dad. As he ushered me out to the room where my wife and son waited, it flashed though my mind to ask him, boy or girl? First? Having another? How’s sleep? Playgroup?

But I didn’t ask any of those things.

I was preoccupied again.

He was a crazy-busy detective, after all.

Detectives didn’t make friends. He must have a lot on his mind. I knew this had to be small talk; he didn’t actually want to know me, did he?

Of course not. Instead I allowed myself to be shown out.

I mumbled a lame, ‘Thanks for your help’, which earned a curt parting nod.

Having collected my wife and son from the childcare room, on my way out I stopped. I looked at the security door that Ed had disappeared through.

I’d missed all of it. I’d missed six months of violent gangsters in the street where I lived and – just then – I’d missed a clear offer from Ed, who had genuinely tried to engage me in conversation.

The drive home from the cop-shop was fraught with doubt. Both my wife and I were silent, and, strangely, our eighteen month-old son was too. I glanced at my wife’s face – she was holding it in. Neither of us wanted to move again. I flicked my eyes to the side mirror and a sharp glance from the headlights from the car behind as it rolled over a speed hump on which illuminated the words: ‘Things in this mirror are closer than they appear.’

I’d missed the gossip from the neighbours. I’d missed the fight that had broken out months earlier and its connotations. I’d missed the significance of the meetings in the courtyard out the front of the apartment block where Tyrone had been slain. I’d spent long hours in front of the computer, or walking with my head in the clouds, missing out on the world around me.

I was so used to news occurring in the past that I couldn’t account for the present.

Perhaps this was the lure of social media – the counterfeit present? Everything occurred in the past. Nothing spontaneous could happen. There was no present – there was only the ‘just-happened’.

If you’re an ordinary struggler like me, you split your thoughts between the past and the future of something done or to be done. Something to be talked about. Something that has to be brought up in tomorrow’s meeting. Something to be fixed. Something to be remembered for next time. A different move to be made in our furious game of ‘demo-crap-oly’ that so closely resembles a pitched chess game. The queen was the only piece that can move in any direction, and we’ve already sacrificed her.

We’ve sacrificed the present, and split it into a variety of playable cards from past and future. I carried my son in from the car. I tucked him, still breathing evenly, into bed.

Another thing I’d missed out on: finding out that Tyrone Slemnik, like Ed and me, also had a two-year-old child.

I closed the bedroom door, whispering promises of tomorrow to him.

It was late. I stood in the same hallway, this time with palms dry. For some reason I flashed on the news crew who’d been outside our place that morning. They’d set up their tripod over a bloodstain in the grass. They’d stared through their narrow lenses, oblivious to what lay just beneath their feet.

Shows you how much you can miss out on, if you really put your mind to it.

I turned out the hall light and switched on the news, then turned it off again. I looked at the blank screen for a while.

The present beckoned… it was only a moment away.

(First published in The Big Smoke, 2013)