Radioactive time.

Eventually I knew that time was not on anyone’s side, let alone mine. It was not, as the human mind imagines, a kind of subterranean stream following along in parallel, a happy bubbling compliant brook. 

That year, time had broken out of its former muzzled existence as a sequence of languid forty-minute school periods. I slept during those lessons. I read Tolkien. I dreamed of white foam creaming on a beach. I ate coffee scrolls at the back of the classroom. 

Now, only months later and school finished for life, time ran my life rather than accommodating it. A Copal clock radio sat by my bed, its rectangular face shedding eerie green light and its mechanism infinitely flipping numbers, like a slow-motion poker machine. It had a wood-grain pattern trimmed with plastic chrome around the edges, like a Cortina’s dashboard. It woke me in darkness with the faltering but carefully enunciated syllables of the early morning Learning English program on 3AR. Or it wove bits of song into my pre-dawn dreams: ‘ … the border’s in sight/I think I’m going to be free …’ ; ‘ … ain’t there one damn song that can make me break down and cry…’ ; ‘ … for you are beautiful, and I have loved you dearly, more dearly than the spoken word can tell’.

Before the clock radio came along from somewhere (I probably borrowed it from my father, he’d been waking up automatically for forty-five years) I had a proper clockwork clock whose hands cast a luminous glow, apparently radioactive. That hardly mattered: the world was about to be destroyed by nuclear warfare; a radium-226 infused clock was the least of my problems. It wound with a satisfying ratchet, like a drumroll in a cup, and sat with a slightly arrogant backwards tilt on my table. When it rang, it sent a satisfyingly resonant bass note down through the woodwork. I had sacrilegiously painted its metal body a lurid colour more appropriate to the 1970s, and one day it disappeared, probably taken by a sibling to sit fluorescently on the mantelpiece of a share house in Parkville.

*

I ran to the bus stop because strolling at that hour of morning seemed a waste of time. I was already slave to just-in-time efficiency, because it was - is - so logical. The blue-and-cream seven o’clock bus, its lean-forward design like a frown of haste, hove along Buckley Street towards Essendon station to meet the 7.20 train, past a roller coaster graph of silhouetted shops and houses. 

My girlfriend had bought me a watch from a glitteringly tiny jeweller’s shop in Flinders Street. It was automatic; it self-wound by the motion of being worn. I kept time going by raising my arm to look at my wrist. Sometimes, on the bedside table at night, it stopped, and then the silence was louder than its almost inaudible busy ticking. I lost the watch somewhere some years later.

The year slipped out of existence; a Chaucerian parade of randomness; Johnny Wakelin, George Baker, Roger Whittaker, Phoebe Snow, Alice Cooper, Tirath Khemlani, Neil Sedaka, the Royal Melbourne Hospital ENT department, RMIT Radio Theatre, the Melbourne University Student Union sound lounge, yards of bloodied gauze, all of the above about buses and trains and clocks etc., the Southern Aurora night train to Sydney, the Bass by-election, winter sun in Launceston, Blood on the Tracks, Mrs Myrtle Doig the ballet fancier who kept calling Odile (the Ceylanese beauty of the golden complexion) Odette, the Queen Anne house in Clarinda Road, Gene Pitney, and girls on the avenue strolling by with their rosebud smiles. Exeunt all, 1975.