What is it about anniversaries? As if they are anything more than another shitty day. Yet some people can’t help themselves. Some people even believe that the day is special and go to great lengths to make it so. I’m not one of them.
Besides, there sure as shit isn’t anything special about being stuck inside a prison with this sorry lot. I’ve been sent to admin to file detainee request forms. It’s a pathetic caper, their wants so small and insignificant when compared to their applications for a refugee visa. Yet little things have a way of taking on outsized meanings when that’s all you’ve got.
I sort through requests for clothing, electronic goods, permission to conduct little events, all sorts of stuff far more pressing than reminiscing about Clem, who was dead yesterday and will be dead tomorrow. It’s pretty strange to think it’s been eleven years already, and I suppose the exact same thing will occur to me in another eleven years, and then another, until sooner or later there won’t be anyone around to even know an anniversary has passed and it’s just a day. Which — and anyone being honest with themselves has to admit this — is all it is now.
I nearly skipped right past it last year. Forgot the whole ridiculous caper till it was lunch. Some old bloke at the orchard I was working at had a pissy little transistor radio playing. A Slim Dusty song came on and that did it; straight away I thought of Clem. Then I realised it was December, but I wasn’t sure of the exact date, so I asked the old feller. Almost got past one, but wasn’t to be.
None of us could work out what it was Clem liked about those shitty country songs. They certainly didn’t speak to Clem’s life or worldview. Not enough scumbag and grifter and alcoholic. I always suspected he hated country music as much as Mum and Oli and I, but listened to it anyway just to piss us off, laughing all the way to the grave.
Mum said they played it at the funeral. “Looking Forward, Looking Back”. Ironic for a man of Clem’s ilk — for one who never did have much to look forward to, or look back on. I would have played “Lithium” by Nirvana. Or “Black Hole Sun” by Soundgarden.
The ghost of Chris Cornell screams his lament in my mind while I beaver away at my mundane task. He forgets the words to the song about the same time I come across an unusual request.
A group of twenty detainees are seeking assistance to find a clergyman to come to the centre and officiate a religious observance. A handwritten note says that the welfare officers tried to fulfil the request, but at this point they have been unable to find anyone with the means to reach our outpost. The request is denied, but the detainees may apply again in the new year.
It strikes me that there’s not many places a clergyman wouldn’t bend over backwards to visit if it meant tending a receptive flock, but it seems Curtin is one of them. You’ve got to hand it to the bureaucrats responsible for this place — they’ve certainly achieved what they set out to. When even an apostle says, nah, sorry mate, too bloody far, that’s when you know you’re isolated.
I feel some sympathy for the detainees because, in a way, I know how that feels — that sense of being cut off, waiting with ever diminishing hope for something that may never come. Knowing you are in it alone because, the truth is, you don’t matter, not in this world.
It was my own fault. I’d made a half-arsed attempt on a comparatively modest Andean mountain, but I wasn’t prepared for how much rock and ice climbing was involved. It looked so easy in the pictures. When I ran out of screws (probably a good thing considering I’m not a climber’s arsehole and was in well over my head) I made my way down. With four days of waiting before my guide returned with his mule, and surrounded by endless mounds of grey, I soon grew restless and decided to find the route back to where we crossed a little river. I figured it would be a good spot to relax and kill time, maybe finish reading The Brothers Karamazov, which I’d lumped through four countries and was struggling to make a dent in.
Yet what had seemed so easy with my guide proved anything but, even with a compass and an old map. The only type of rivers I found were rivers of scree, the valleys and gullies filled with rock and rubble that looked the same in every fucking direction. There was surely a point where I could have back-tracked out of the mess I’d made, but when I finally admitted defeat — I later found out I had worked my way round to the other side of the mountain — that point was long past.
I recalled reading somewhere that as soon as you become lost the best thing to do is to stay put, or you risk making a bad situation worse. So after I’d already made the situation about as bad as I could, that’s what I did. I waited.
Time moved very slow. You’d think that with no outside influences, no white noise, no interruptions, it would be an opportunity for expansive thinking about life, the universe, all sorts of wonderful shit. Wasn’t like that. It was just the same handful of miserable thoughts on repeat. Thoughts about all the shit that was wrong with me, shit I’d messed up in life, the people I’d hurt, the opportunities I’d fucked up, the stupidity and ugliness of being me in that moment.
By the third day I felt a sense of aloneness that was utter desolation. It was more than the fear of dying — it was the fear of dying without anyone to notice I was gone. And the thought that it was precisely what I had coming.
But I was just being melodramatic. On the fourth day the Bolivian bloke and his stroppy mule came looking for me. Turned out someone did notice, even if it was for no better reason than he was dead keen to get the other half of his guide fee. I was happy to give it to him.
I figure the poor mongrels in here must be feeling an acute sense of the same, surrounded by people yet utterly alone and completely cut off from every sphere of meaning in their life. When you’re so isolated that even a clergyman can’t be bothered, your prison is no longer built of ringlock and razor wire. It’s become a prison of the mind.
So, yeah, they’ve definitely got it worse than me. All I have is a shitty father who isn’t around anymore, who causes me a moment’s grief once a year. These guys? Their whole lives are fucked.