C. M. Julius had just leisurely driven three miles of empty, quiet road and had arrived at the driveway to his home, or more accurately put, the place where he currently resided. As he turned in, he saw that he would have to stop, straighten up, reverse, and then there just might be enough space, and the way might be clear for him to drive down the fifty or so yards that led to his front door. This was not the first time that he was required to perform this manoeuvre and, much to his regret, from all indications it probably would indeed not be his last.
The practice had long been established. All tenants had been assigned parking spaces. Mr Grey’s was at the very top of the driveway, and on days when he was meticulous about how he parked, C. M. Julius did not have to worry about performing this manoeuvre. But those days were few, and again this morning his car did not quite fit, hence he found himself once again reversing onto the main road, blind. The two large high walls on either side of the narrow driveway rendered it impossible to see oncoming traffic in either direction, when driving out. And the ever so slight bend in the road did not make the task any easier. But it was three fifteen in the morning and he had not seen a single car along the way.
C. M. Julius could have spoken to Mr Grey, and maybe asked him to park just a couple feet further down, but alas he had never had the good fortune of meeting the goodly gentleman. Their goings and comings never seemed coincided.
He did, one Sunday morning, have a discreet word with his landlady about the matter, but it was a Sunday and he had not meant to cause her any more worries than she already had. So, in the end, he assured her that he could live with the inconvenience, that he only drove occasionally anyway, and that it would be okay. Then he calmly walked the fifteen or so yards to his door, and with every step he came to the realisation that it was not okay.
No. It was not okay.
C. M. Julius had been fortunate to have seen the advertisement early. It was the rent stated that attracted his attention. He had to find a place. He could no longer pay the rent for the house in which he lived. He urgently needed to find accommodation that was considerably less expensive. This was a matter about which he could not be complacent, for in a few days he would either leave voluntarily or suffer the humiliation of being tossed out. It was with this prospect vividly looming in his immediate future that he paid the rent in cash; the landlady had said she no longer took cheques. He had accepted the keys, smiled, said thank you and moved in five days later.
He was uneasy even then.
He realised that in a small society, seemingly small things could sometimes take on monumental significance, and these significances mattered. For C. M. Julius, the number of small things was multiplying. He had been without a full-time job for some time. In fact, in three months it would be five years since he had last received a cheque as a full-time salaried employee. Since then, he had started a couple businesses of his own, he had made some money, but he had lost a lot more. His ventures, one after another, had failed. And he often thought that he had been brave, though fortune seemed to have withheld its favour. Now with a small unreliable income generated principally from part-time teaching and the odd consultancy, he found life unbearably difficult. The constraints on his ability to exercise choice were becoming greater and greater, and it was in this recognition that he experienced his deepest darkness.
During the day, the area was usually noisy. The sound of traffic was omnipresent, the roar of the engines of the big trucks and the buses could be heard as they aggressively fought for dominance on the roadway. The scream of tires, screeching from vehicles suddenly braking on the asphalt, was commonplace, followed by the brief moment of silence when one waited to hear the dull thud of an actual collision. Then the arguments would start. Then sometimes the crowd that gathered would inflict further pain on the unfortunate souls trapped in the mangled metal by separating them from their possessions. The dead were not spared and were often picked clean: wristwatches, earrings, bracelets, bangles, chains, shoes. All were taken. To rob the dead was easy, it seemed. Then the police would come, followed by the ambulance. And then if a little luck held, in a day or two the rains would come and wash the blood away.
During the night it was quieter.
And it was best when it rained. It was then that C. M. Julius felt most reassured about life and about what he liked to refer to as the “genuine goodness” of the world. He was never quite sure of exactly where to locate the centre of this feeling, what its origin was and why. These were questions he had tried to answer over time, but he was never quite content with the kind of conclusions he arrived at, so he kept searching. He thought, though, that somehow it all had to do with the essential primordial nature of wetness; the possibility of cleansing and renewal, the fact that after the rains, colours seemed somehow clearer, brighter; in fact, cleaner, really. That life had begun again.
But an even more important component of his conviction about the basic wonder of nature was the sound of the crickets and the frogs and the myriad other insects that chorused in the dark after the rain. And if life was really good, and one was truly fortunate, there would be an electrical power failure, and the dark would be really solid, and in it would be families, multiple families of fireflies lighting up and making one entity of the land and sky. And he would say to himself, “All of this has to be good,” and that would be enough to allow him to consign the indecencies of life to something transitory.
Transitory—the home of all those bits that did not quite fit.
His apartment fitted neatly into this category. It was a flat really, a roomy, spacious place, but somehow he and this place just did not quite fit: the kitchen with its cupboards and countertops covered with reddish-brown, imitation woodgrain Formica that revealed a history of former tenants, and its deep dull red tiled floor, felt as though it was hostile to light. His refrigerator did not quite fit the space allocated to it, and remained jutting out, taking up half of the doorway. His landlady had already expressed her unease with the idea of having a carpenter come in to alter some of the cupboard space so as to allow the refrigerator to fit against the wall, so for the moment it remained a peninsula with its electrical cord languidly hanging across the space to the wall outlet. The same was true of the stove. There was a bath where he preferred a shower.
All these little things kept adding up. It was not that he lacked space; there was more than enough, even on the outside, though here again there was discomfort. The whole place had been paved with that now mossed and weathered dull grey concrete that had become the material of choice in the construction industry. There was no lawn. There was no garden, just some rusting discarded oil drums cut in half in which the representatives of botanical life seemed to struggle. He supposed that this helped to keep the energy and capital expended on maintenance low, but for him it just did not quite fit.
Each day he felt, more and more, that his being was constantly under attack. He sensed that his aesthetic self was contemplating exile. And a slow, draining weight of acquiescence seemed to be making its presence felt.
And here now, at three fifteen in the morning, he found himself having to decide what he ought to do about Mr Grey and his vehicle.
It had come to this.
C. M. Julius slowly reversed the car, straightened it up, drove down the driveway and parked in his designated spot. He went into the flat, turned on all the lights and packed. At dawn soon after the rain stopped, he left.
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