Rush Hour

Slick-talking solicitors and barristers and tricky chartered accountants and super-charged public relations spinners and fashion empire goddesses and gods, and a multitude of sundry capitalistic adventurers churning out services and statistics and products and ideas and ideals: course through the streets like Skyscraper’s vomit. Male and female, equipped with the same gender-specific Italian suit and leather brief-case tightly clenched flying straight as an arrow as fast as the legs striding beside it - the finishing touch to the illusion of the possession of power.  Top flight executives tumble out with their support crew of office workers, from the network of skinny city streets onto the wide boulevards lined with shops, bars, cafes and restaurants and every so often, a lovely green Plane tree.

Swarms of them disappear straight through the doors of low lit Bars for a Heineken or Chardonnay, or an honest shot of hard liquor to dislodge the mud of the day.  The shopping-addicted whose Visa and Mastercard and Amex hasn’t exploded yet, decide on takeout pizza for the husband and kids, and guiltily duck into designer Boutiques. You never know what must-have will cry out for ownership or what otherwise unknown bargain will materialise.  Just one last little acquisition before the push onto trams and trains.

Most rush to get out of the hustle of the inner city to their families and tidy houses and lawns in the outer suburban sprawl. Childless executives go to inner-city apartments and on to bars and restaurants and on lonelier more desperate nights transform into intrepid hunters: unholy body rumbling, mind numbing anonymous sex in their sights.  Erica Yong’s zipless fuck is still sought after: precious albeit a momentary satiation and a precursor to deeper loneliness and self reassurances that the real search is for the perfect partner to share marriage and children and suburban paradise with. Is that what it’s all about? Later though.  Much later. 

Buffered from the sonic pulse of life outside the metal casing of an air-conditioned taxi, Bach’s Violin Concerto Number One, serenades Cathy and Helena.  They float through the rush: disengaged, as though it were a mechanised Surrealist painting – a clone of life - one dimensional. It is the realisation that soon she will become a part of this buoyant throng of humanity: eating, drinking, shopping, laughing, crying, living, and dying – accepting of that ultimate fate – along with them - that triggers a swift flow of adrenaline from Cathy’s pancreas into her veins and into the mysterious mind sitting somewhere within the spongy physicality of her brain.  Or outside of it maybe.

She peers, wide-eyed, through the taxi window in awe at the trams laden with people - some seated, others standing grasping the leather slings that hang from the top rails.  The tram in front of them squeakily halts. The debarking and embarking push through one another as though neither exist. It’s terrifying, the prospect of catching one of these noisy metal monsters.

They stop again at the corner of Flinders and Swanston Streets. The herd that waited a moment ago: poised, anticipating, and speculating on the good-to-go green flash, crash like Wildebeest across a crocodile infested Kalahari Desert River, and plunge dangerously up the wide steps, disappearing into the dark labyrinth of Flinders Street Train Station. 

Pushed to the sides by the deluge of nine-to-fivers, smoking students and activist-looking types lean nonchalantly into the stone walls. Run of the mill joe-bloe-mary-janes stand in the premeditated casual pose waiting as planned, under the row of clocks for friends and potential friends. Cathy looks for the tell-tale white carnation in the lapel, or magenta pink scarf casually thrown around a seen-better-days neck. Or is this an image too civilised?

The Paper Vendor guards a six-foot portable shelf that restrains the evening editions of the city’s newspapers and a generous display of magazines.  Glossy covers seduce the target with cutting edge fashion fabulously draped around impossibly thin-hipped fillies - unattainable confidence emanating from airbrushed eyes.  And architecturally designed homes with infinity pools and lush, no-expense-spared gardens, punctuate the Western Dream.  Cheap glamour sneaks out from behind wraps: lavish blondes with humongous perfectly formed tits and undersized bums hinting at a brazilian within the covers, oozing saccharine promises, igniting raw sexual urges, the visuals fanning the fire. What wives do these husbands go to now? How many won’t give them what they yearn for tonight? And when they do, which pucker-lipped image will the husbands discharge to? The Vendor’s bony boy expertly weaves through the crowds holding the papers high, touting the day’s top stories with good healthy lungs. Seven hundred oil wells are burning.  Ferocious orange flames tear through the black smoke which shrouds the sun, turning day to night, choking Kuwait. Visions of Armageddon.

Half articulated thoughts thunder through Cathy’s mind, trampling the undergrowth of history, making way for new, strong, grown-up revelations to shoot upwards into her heaven: where she is all-knowing and all-seeing - her own god. She sees how it is. Momentarily. And wonders, is a simple response – pure and unadulterated by presupposition – the raw, real truth? Then the fear rams into her gut. The plastic wrapping on the duty free crinkles and the glass bottles clink together when she touches the bag with her toe.