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The Southland Diaries (day 09) [explicit!]
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Diaries The ninth day of my ‘real estate promotion guy’ job at the Southland complex. It’s been copied verbatim and has not been altered in any way, hence the grammatical mistakes and poor expression. Each number corresponds to a page in the A4 note book I used to write all this rubbish in.
Wed 14/07/2004
1.
10:47am Good morning Peter. Good morning Karen. Hello Southland. Hello relief! Hello another three days of monotony.
My oh my… I just spotted a woman with an arse so largely disproportionate to the rest of her body I felt compelled to ask “what happened to your arse?”
Only have a couple of chapters to go in “The Remains of the Day”, so I think I’ll get back to it.
11:26am So then, what remains of the day for Billy Boarster? Too tired and weary to contemplate this philosophical paradigm right now. In a literal sense, of this day in particular, it will certainly entail the acquisition of another of the novels listed in my set reading for ‘Contemporary Fiction WRT2405’.
Gaaaaawd… so tired. Decided to wean myself off the dexters, as I won’t be able to depend on them after leaving the country. This should at least make S**** somewhat mollified, though I fear my openness with my consumption habits regarding not only dexters, but also alcohol, have damaged our acquaintance beyond repair. Well, it wasn’t so much my confessions, nor her disapproval of my lifestyle, that damaged our relationship as such, it was more or less caused by our respective stubbornness.
Haven’t spotted ‘Back-Pack’ man yet, but the ‘crazy bearded dwarf’ just strolled by, muttering some loud exclamations to a man and his son, walking not far ahead of him. Then again, I was probably too engrossed with my book to take note of any particular passers by, little less any of the complex “mascots”.
2.
12:33pm My literal ‘remains of the day’ prediction proved to be an impossible feat, as none of the commercial book retailers at this complex have ANY of my prescribed reading in stock.
What did I expect? It’s like turning on the TV, to a commercial network during prime-time, and expecting to see an educational documentary on particle physics. Of course they wouldn’t have these books in stock! I had to settle for Coupland’s “Hey Nostradamus!”, as I refuse to commute for two hours without a good book to distract me from studying the dreary masses that share my journey home. Although, by the time I’ve reached my tram stop, I’m usually alone.
The two girls at ‘Angus & Robertson’ recognised me today, and after I handed one of them my priority list of required books, we all struck up a brief conversation about my studies. Turns out one of them is also studying writing, at Deakin University. The other, after discovering my mode of study, mentioned she had attempted studying via correspondence before, but lacked the self-discipline and needed the human contact. I, too, lack self-discipline, but I certainly don’t need the human contact. I have to say though, that I do miss having those close and personal tutorials (I used to have) with some of my teaching professors of second year units at La Trobe. But I don’t miss any of my fellow students, save for M******. I often wonder what became of her. We would have made a great couple. Pity I was already involved in a relationship, whose doom did not become evident until many months after I dropped out of uni. I did make a couple of feeble attempts to look her up, to no avail. She’d probably married and changed her surname.
“Our sales will go down!” exclaimed the first girl, after the discovery of my upcoming Nigerian trip. Have I really bought that many books?
3.
14:49pm Cheryl is dead. I think I’ll leave the discovery of Jason’s fate for the trip home. Feeling a bit sombre right now, macabre even. Anticipating some crazy, disillusioned evil fuck to start firing away at any given moment. A shopping centre like this would be the ideal setting for a wannabe mass-murderer, or psychopath to-be.
Some Japanese guy swindled me out of $12 earlier, with his earnest sincerity, in exchange for three measly chocolate bars. He couldn’t speak English very wel, but introduced himself as “Kenji”, offering some sort of identification tag with pictures on it. It seemed he was raising money to educate children in Tuvalu. I hesitated for a moment, as $12 is quite a bit to be asking for from a charity cause – most go for the easily manageable $2, or, at most, $5 – but his smile, enthusiasm and quirky way of begging (“Oh, Mr. Robert-san, pleeeeez!”) soon won me over. Besides, I paid for it with social security funds. May as well give the tax-payers something righteous for their money, for the rest will just be spent on drugs and alcohol on my last weekend away. Thanks to Centrelink, I am going to one last outdoor psy-trance party! ;o)
Getting sick of the crowd noises. The headphones are going back on! Hello Talamasca!
As I was reading earlier I intermittently looked up and performed a quick visual scan of all the passers-by, to see if – well, let’s face it – any babes were walking by, but also, to see if there were any people approaching my desk with that “Oh, where is that?” look on their face, after spotting the display posters behind me. There is also a third type that I scan for. The type that does staggered
4.
…pirouettes, looking for some sign to guide them towards whatever it is they’re looking for. Sometimes I think they stage it, in order to invoke some sort of sympathy towards them being lost, before they creep over and ask for directions. This last stage only seems to happen if I make eye contact, so I quickly divert my glance as soon as I identify this type. Then, of course, there will always be the type who doesn’t need eye contact in order to divert a young man’s attention, which was otherwise deeply engrossed with novel-reading and music-listening, in order to ask their stupid questions of specific consumer direction, when such information is freely and willingly available at the information desk ten metres behind me.
Food Court: “Up the escalator to level three and follow the corridor down that way…”
Everything else: “I’m not sure, but there’s an information desk just behind me…”
Earlier today: an ancient man in a custom-made wheelchair edged his way to my desk via this lever attached to one of the wheels. Poor old codger. Probably couldn’t afford a motorised scooter, and his frail limbs weren’t strong enough to push the wheels manually. At least thirty or forty seconds must have passed from the moment I realised he was going to jerk his wheelchair forward to my desk and ask me for some sort of directions, to the time he actually pulled up next to it. The entire journey being less than three metres. He looked like a skeleton cling-wrapped with beige, white and translucent multi-coloured leopard skin, and had a long, red protruding nose, dripping with the leaky accuracy of an old, washer-less, rusty tap.
5.
“Vaach!” his old and weathered lungs managed to squeeze out, once he’d come to a full rest next to my desk.
“Excuse me?” I was perplexed.
“Vaaach!” he exclaimed, a little louder.
“Oh, watch?” I presumed. “It’s umm… one o’clock!” I replied cheerfully.
“No! Vaaaach!” Again louder, nose dripping away.
I pictured his entire frame crumbling to dust should he have to exert any more effort into communicating his query, so I tried real hard to read him. He began to rattle his left bone-arm, trying to shake a wrist-watch out from underneath is jumper, so he could clearly point at it.
“Oh… time? It’s O-N-E O’-C-L-O-C-K!” answering louder, clearer, and slower, convinced he’d just misheard my first reply.
“No, vaach.” He muttered with some resignation, tugging at the golden band of his wrist watch.
“Oh! You want to buy a watch?” it finally dawned upon me.
Straight across from me, across the open centre section where the escalators make their systematic climb from level to level, there is a clearly visible jewellery store.
“I’m sorry mate… dunno… but there’s an information desk right behind me.”
I opt for cowardice, being terrified of having to endure painfully lengthy confrontations of direction-giving to individuals who have obvious and major language barriers when it comes to conversing in English. Especially those who have the physical appearance of somebody who’s able to infect me with an airborne strain of leprosy!
6.
15:53pm Fuck! Promised myself I wouldn’t dribble on too much today but I’m already up to page six. I need a piss… Still have an hour and a half to go, and I think that’s too long to hold off.
16:11pm He returns, with a large, strong Café Latté, from ‘The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf’, having willed himself to not buy the same equivalent from the ‘McCafé’ he passed on his way back from the toilet. Shopping centre: the epitome of our McSistence!
Shopping bags, crinkly, plasticy
Pouring down the umbilical cords
Ingenious man-made polymers
To hug and embrace
New shoes, new hair, new dress
Tapping away at your console
Relentless consumer ideals realised
To entice and justify
Deep-fried, grilled, pressure-cooked
Pushing beyond the metabolic norm
Opportunist capitalization of laziness
To baste and glaze
7.
Bright, sparkly, neon-bright
Inserting twinkles in your eye
Jolly network of mass-communication
To reassert and reinvent
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16:47pm Just under forty-five minutes to go… got two contacts jotted down on the name sheet. Not bad for a day where I rarely took my eyes off either one of the two novels I’ve been reading, or this notepad.
This time, in a fortnight, I’ll be rising for my second day of work, in Lagos. I’m amazed I still turn up to these pointless shifts. It’ll be hard on Saturday… I’ll have to think of some unique stunt to brighten my last day of this little ‘real estate promotion guy’ episode. Well, at least it was more comfortable sitting inside, rather than on a freezing train platform.
Enough pointless dribble! Let’s see what happened to Jason…
Your diaries "The Reminds of the Day" of your job at the Southland complex...those who read with eagerness, one like me.