There's Some Desolate Places

By Jeffrey Harris

Lisa persuades Ken to take a road trip to Tickera. She has a romantic notion that the outback town could provide an interesting back drop for a film. They soon discover there's little to see...or is there?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blue Wings
• Release date: Jan 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301123032

Jeffrey Harris

J.F. Harris was born in South Australia. A diving accident at the age of 17 left him a quadriplegic. Being confined to a wheelchair for the remainder of his life, he took to writing as a form of therapy. This was a painstaking task as he only had the use of two fingers hitting the keyboard, an art he perfected over time. He struggled for the last ten years of his life with respiratory illnesses that eventually took his life at the age of 61. His fiction works include novels, screenplays and collections of short stories.

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THERE’S SOME DESOLATE PLACES

J.F.HARRIS

IF HOME IS TRULY WHERE YOUR HEART IS

THEN SOMETIMES, YOU’LL FIND IT BEST

IF YOU’LL LEAVE YOUR HEART AT HOME

Published by Jeffrey Harris at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Jeffrey Harris

Discover other titles by J.F. Harris at https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/JeffHarris

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THERE’S SOME DESOLATE PLACES

It was a lonely place, Tickera; it was for most that happened upon it. A quiet little out of the way settlement of fishers and farmers who for the better majority eked out but meagre livings that only managed to keep them trapped there. Soddened tidal flats reeking of decaying marine life stretched along the coastline to the east where they lay shimmering throughout the day stagnating like carelessly forgotten memories. The dusty-blue green-grey saltbush plains patched with frugal attempts of cultivation reached inland to the west as far as the eye could see. The land was arable but by no accounts plentiful. It was perched at the top of the gulf where the ocean air that funnelled up the gulf, brought a bank of moist air with it that hung over the place like a dampened raincoat; which provided little virtue in an almost virtue-less terrain.

Good looks or attractiveness, often seen as a gift of sorts, both cherished and envied, can often be an encumbering burden. The trouble is that, despite its apparent virtue, people will inadvertently determine the merits of that supposed gift in accordance with the combination of their individualised circumstances along with their inherent characteristics of their natures and personal reflections therein. Daisy Morrison was a prime example of the disparity. She was certainly attractive and one said to 'have seen her day' long before her day was done. But then the good fortune of her life or whatever it was in her particular case saw her to remain looking relatively the same up until the day she died. That gave her a particular convenience that set her up in an ill-matched marriage along with a wanton life-style that followed its somewhat early demise that eventually choked her.

Daisy began her married life in a beguiling child-like delusion of romance with Earl, a promisingly earnest, stalwart character. She married early, escaping an oppressive crowded family life with overly Catholicated parents, who were solemnly indifferent to each other, by surrendering herself to what was for her the unwelcoming subliminal trauma of marital obligation that she never enjoyed throughout the entire duration of her marriage. She had four sons, Aleck, the oldest, Gary, the second, and then a four year gap followed before the two younger sons, Grant and Greg, came along. Her husband, Earl, was an honest simple man, seven years older than her, who dutifully worked hard and expected little embellishment from life other than constant respect and obedience from his wife and his sons.

Earl was a seemingly ubiquitous character who lived and laboured under the age old alluring concept of the general paradigm and seemed incapable of relating to life in any other context outside of it. He married Daisy, who was an attractive younger woman, expecting her to serve him just as dutifully as he intended to provide for her but then little else. Earl too like his wife, Daisy, came from a crowded family but in his case, which was unlike his wife, it was one to which he did not rightfully belong. His parents, for whatever unknown reason, had abandoned him in his infancy at the local Presbyterian church leaving him to grow up feeling unwanted and not knowing who he really was in a family that aside from their ominous sense of impounding charity had little more to offer him. Being forced to make do with constantly having ‘less than’ others tends to manifest or produce a particular sombreness in a person that becomes inwardly and outwardly omnipresent about them. Earl’s apparent lack of imagination consequently deemed him an unfulfilling marital partner as well as a lack-lustre, fun-less, parent who, sadly for anyone directly involved with him in that respect, aside for his being the economic provider, was only able function at best as an unforgivingly ardent disciplinarian. His tyrannical reign over their family was cut short with his relatively early departure due to heart failure but it was not without leaving its mark.

Daisy denied herself and the gloominess of her married life by choosing to live in a deluded daydream haze of an existence which unfortunately, despite whatever it might have done for her personally, failed to provide any repair to their marital situation and in turn it only proved integral in a manifestly gloomy family life. Aleck, the oldest son, most likely in reflection of his father’s eternal belittlement and harsh treatment of him, was a constant bully to his younger brothers. He was also just as protective of them outside of the home as they all were of each other and they had quite a reputation because of it.

Aleck left home early and, aside from a few letters that he sent home to his mother in his earlier days, had nothing to do with any of the others ever after. He moved to the city where, after drifting about from one job to another, finally saw to educating himself fit enough to become a politician of certain meagre renown. The second son, Gary, worked in a tyre-repair shop that was located in a nearby town which he eventually bought considerably cheaply when the owner-manager died and his surviving relatives, having no interest in it other than to unload it as quickly as they could, sold it to him on a managerial time payment basis. He too like his older brother, Aleck, also divorced himself of the family once he had left home.

Their father, Earl, had died a couple of years before that and he, as much as for their sakes as well as for his, never got to see their successes. It was in what were economically depressed times and he worked himself to death for virtually nothing while gaining little or no enrichment out of life in doing so and giving his wife much the same in respect of their marital relationship and with his sons, in his parenting as well. His wife, Daisy, was left with basically nothing but wondering if she did not feel better for it regardless and then she got a job as a barmaid in a local RSL-hotel of a nearby town to start her life anew. She had not even drunk alcohol before then but she soon got used to the rigorous work demands and lewd familiarities, and it all too soon became her. She was enraptured by the freedom of her new life and that was made apparent by the overt wantonness that she came to earn her reputation but with her sons being as reputedly formidable as they were, the reputation was rarely ever bandied, at least not openly, and it eventually saw what perhaps might have been seen the better of her a few years later.

Some people deal with the burden of their memories by detaching themselves of them as they adopt whatever others whereas for some other, perhaps less fortunate, individuals their memories will tend to inadvertently become them instead. That was where the two younger brothers, Grant and Greg, came into the story. For them, it was more likely because of some inherent attitudinal disparity rather than any intellectual shortcoming, that they failed to prosper as did the other two. They shared a house out of town, a big old family place with lots of rooms in the middle of nowhere that was ominously bereft of any welcoming spirit or homeliness that had long abandoned it. It, too, like Gary’s tyre shop was a deceased estate and they were both equally paying rent on it that was collected from them for a while until it stopped one day and neither of them ever heard any more about it. They knew that it had not been given to them but the cessation of the payment and the surplus of money resulting from it suited them naturally enough so, with neither of them being driven by any compulsion of honesty or any other likes thereof, they never pursued the matter at all or cared about it.

Living at Tickera was simply an everyday matter of fact for Greg and Grant that usually went without question. They were more inclined to wonder why of anyone that might have left the place, excepting Aleck and Gary, their older brothers. Their leaving there was an eventual end to an uncomfortable existence that Greg and Grant appreciated too much to be wasting any time wondering about it. Neither of them were the type to be wondering too much about anything anyway. They were rabbit trappers living in a big old abandoned house together with seemingly little expectations of life and little interaction between them otherwise, apparently.

Tickera was more of a village than a town; the kind of place where tourists usually ended up when they had gone too far or gone wrong. It was a virtually unknown place and, aside from its usual seasonal burst of wildflowers, it had next to nothing attractive about it but Lisa and Ken who were a couple of sorts were going there for a purpose, a particular purpose. Neither of them knew much about the place in reality and neither of them thought that they were sharing the sentiment of that purpose, in reality.

Lisa was an artistic person who had tried a lot of things, employment wise particularly, none of which had suited her so she was living on welfare and having had one meagre success in the art-film world, optimistically imagined herself as a filmmaker.