East: A Novel

By Peri Hoskins

"... in a word: astonishing." - Vincenzo Scipione, US literary agent

"The writing is superb ... If there is any writer that Hoskins reminds me of it would be John Steinbeck. But instead of Northern California and the Salinas Valley, we get to explore Australia and New Zealand." - Ray Simmons, Readers' Favorite

"... The result is a road tale that takes interpersonal connections and discoveries and elevates them to a new level of introspection and growth, making 'East - A Novel' highly recommended for readers who like their stories introspective as well as adventurous, and who look at the road trip experience as one example of growth-inducing decisions." - D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

"What an amazing capture of unadulterated raw humanity, in all its shades of light and darkness. I read it over a few days. Couldn't put it down ... Really, really enjoyed it." - Teresa Herleth

If you liked Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" or Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" you will love "East". It’s 1994. Junior lawyer, Vince Osbourne, leaves behind a viciously circular life in the city representing petty criminals and takes to the road. He’s lived 30 years. The wide continent of Australia is out in front. He’s almost young. Where will the road lead?

"East" takes in sunsets; rain in the desert; a five-year-old girl on a bike; a battered former thief and jockey; old-timers; young lovers; beautiful women, and aboriginals in public bars. The open road connects many vignettes making a rich tapestry of human encounters.

"East" is poignant, gritty, funny, sad and above all: human. Hoskins’ laconic prose captures the harsh, arid country in all its big, empty beauty along with quirky exchanges with strangers, travel buddies, shop assistants, workmates, and friends old and new. A journey without and within, "East" taps into the spiritual realm that lies beneath this land and its people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peri Hoskins
• Release date: Feb 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9780473251277

Peri Hoskins

Peri Hoskins, a child of the twentieth century, was born in Wellington, New Zealand. He is the second son of a family of five children, four boys and a girl. Peri grew up in Whangarei, Northland, New Zealand, a provincial city then home to about 30,000 people. He was educated at Whangarei Boys’ High School where he twice won a national essay competition. After completing high school and winning the school prizes for English, History and Geography, Peri went to Auckland University where he studied law and the humanities, including history and English literature. Peri was mainly based in Australia between 1985 and 2005. He completed his study of law and the humanities at the University of Sydney including several courses in philosophy. He worked as a lawyer in New South Wales before embarking on a 1994 five-month road trip all around Australia. This road trip comprises the material for his book, "East - A Novel". Peri subsequently worked as a lawyer in both New South Wales and Queensland, and developed his current specialisation in legal work – civil litigation. In December 1999 Peri travelled to the Kingdom of Tonga to be in the first country in the world to see in the new millennium. The diary of his three weeks in Tonga has become "Millennium – A Memoir", a book of creative nonfiction. In 2004 Peri completed a post graduate diploma in film and television production at Queensland University of Technology. Peri now lives, writes and works as a barrister (being a self-employed lawyer) in Northland, New Zealand.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Leaving

The bonnet in front of me is big and white. Rain on the windscreen – the wipers sweep it away. The clouds are grey, the road is grey, the suburbs are grey and I am leaving. There is joy in that. I’m leaving it behind – a life – small, petty, viciously circular. Out in front is the road and I don’t know where it will end. I am free. I’m almost young.

A beginning. Renewal pulses in my blood, pumping out from my heart, through my veins, feeding me, making me new again, a keenly conscious being reaching out to the uncertainty. This road will lead me to places that I have not seen – to people I have not met. There’s no place I have to be and no time I have to be there.

I drive on and on leaving the city far behind. The rain clears. Sunlight glints on wet grass and trees. I see farmhouses, fences and cows. The gnawing in my belly eases as I’m gently enveloped by the freedom of the great mystery now upon me. The shackles of the old life fall away, for I’m shedding a skin – dry, worn, old and scaly. I found the courage to step into the dream. And the dream has become real.

The life of a suburban lawyer is behind me. Small decisions. Small repetitions. Which tie to wear today. Pay the electricity bill. Sunday – iron five shirts for the week ahead. See the same people. Say the same things. Hear the same things said. In that life I wondered whether I had it better than the petty criminals I represented in court. Some had no job and no home. They pleaded guilty and I said what I could say, for something had to be said. And then the court, that street-sweeper of humanity, tidied them away. For there must be a place – there must be somewhere for them to go: a prison, a halfway house, a drug rehab centre. There must be a place for everyone – somewhere. These people had fallen through cracks and become untidy. Did they envy my tidy life, those that I helped to tidy away? Did they see my life as I saw it – not a tidy life, but a tidy prison?

Tidiness. I had been taught to lead a tidy life. What was it they had said – the teachers, the headmasters? Work hard at school. Get a good job. Be a good employee. Pay your taxes. Mow your lawns. Be a good neighbour. Be a good citizen. Lead a tidy life. Not a full life, a varied life, a great life – no, a tidy life of small neat circles. I have lived thirty years.

As the trees and houses and petrol stations whistle by, the reasons for leaving once again crowd my mind. At thirty, life no longer stretches out before me like an uncharted great ocean. If I live to be eighty, more than one third of my life is spent. Where am I? At a time of life when I’m supposed to be somewhere – I’m nowhere I ever wanted to be. I’ll taste the last drops of youth before the cup passes from my lips, forever. The familiar yearning claws at my insides again – but it’s different now – it’s happy knowing I have been true to it – finally.

The yearning ... a murmur in a corner of my soul ... that’s how it started ... a couple of years ago ... I pushed it away. I was busy; there were things to do. It kept coming back, stronger and stronger: a growing gnawing that would not be denied. The day I turned thirty, I came to know what it was, finally. It was the feeling of having missed my destiny. At one of life’s important junctures, I don’t know when or where, I’d taken the wrong turn.

So maybe that’s what it is: a journey back down life’s highway to try and find the turn I missed. A journey to reconnect with who I am and what I should be doing here – in this life. Did I ever really want to be a lawyer? Maybe I did it because my father didn’t finish law school. Maybe I did it for him, and not for me. Didn’t have the courage to find my destiny and follow it ... settled for safety and caution. And the small repetitions of the safe life had closed in and were suffocating me. Don’t know if that’s what it is ... I had to go – I know that much ... it was the most honest thing I could do. And now it’s real: this journey with no end and no decided route. It’s a big country. Yeah, I’ll head east ... And in my travels maybe I’ll find something of the soul of this land and its people ...

I have been at the wheel for four hours. The muscular movements needed to keep the car on course have become automatic. My thoughts drift freely now, first to the future – new, pregnant with possibility – before anchoring in my childhood. I recall a long-buried idea – from a time of wonder at a world full of possibilities. As a child I thought I could see into people, a kind of second sight.

Memories flow into my mind – sharp, clear, focused. I see things now as I saw things then. I am a small boy sitting in the passenger seat of a car. My father is driving. We approach an intersection. A policeman is standing in the middle directing traffic. He signals the car in front to stop. The policeman fascinates me – his neat blue uniform, high black boots, long white gloves – his precise hand signals. He makes cars stop and go by moving his hands like the man who made the puppets move at the fairground. The gloved hands move and the cars obey, crossing the intersection, slowly and respectfully passing the uniformed man.

From above I hear the noise of a plane. In the eye of my mind as a child I see the silver wings and fuselage. The policeman’s eyes turn skyward to the plane I see clearly in the window of my imagination. The officer’s long-gloved hands slowly fall to rest at his heavy belt. Cars bank up at the intersection. The driver in front looks at him for directions but he gives none. Unconscious of the traffic, his attention is focused in the sky above. The face of the policeman loses form and I see into him. First I feel his discomfort in the hot uniform, the dryness in his throat and the tiredness behind his eyes. Gradually my perception deepens. I sense the numbed heart, the thwarted ambitions – the hopes and dreams unrealized and gone awry. He doesn’t want to be here, directing traffic. The past has cheated him. He is disconnected from the present and fearful of the future.

A car horn honks from behind. A driver doesn’t know why the traffic is not moving. The policeman’s eyes return to the traffic, his arms snapping up with military precision. As he waves us on, the look of purpose clothes his face once again and the moment of seeing into him has passed.

The second sight would come to me without warning and always just for a fleeting moment or two. I would see my mother trying to hide an emotion or catch my father unguarded, looking into the distance. In the moment of second sight the physical would melt – the body become transparent and amorphous. Instead of seeing the person I would see into the person – reach inside to the heart, sense the fears, touch the dreams – see the humanity, raw and struggling.

Chapter 2

Between Cities

I am between cities. The rain pelts down on the windscreen in huge interconnected drops. I switch the wipers to their fastest speed – but the blades are old and worn. The road ahead remains a watery blur. A service station appears out of the murky grey. I swing the car off the highway into the forecourt.

As I get out of the car I notice a man – or maybe a boy – watching me from the shelter of the forecourt roof. Clad in an old jacket, faded jeans and sneakers, he holds a scuffed briefcase. He is slim with a birdlike frailty, dishevelled, wet and ill at ease. I can’t see the pupil of one eye – the whole of the eye is blood red. The red eye marks him out as different – the injured bird that can no longer fly with the flock. Can I see into him, as I sometimes saw into people as a child? For a fleeting moment, I think so. It passes – all I see in his one good eye is quiet eager need.

‘Can you give me a lift, mate?’ he asks in a small voice.

I look him over once again. He’s smaller than me. If I have to I can open the door and push him out of the car. ‘Where to?’

‘Down south, Nangari ... or wherever,’ he says.

‘We’ll see.’

I lock the car and go inside the station shop.

I feel the gaze of his eyes between my shoulder blades as I fit new rubber to metal wiper-housings. The rain hammers down on the forecourt roof above. New blades fitted, I throw the old ones into the black plastic bin next to the petrol pump. I turn to face him.

‘What happened to your eye?’

‘I got rolled. They took all me money. That’s why I’m hitching,’ he says in a squeaky voice.

‘All right, hop in.’ I open the passenger door.

‘Oh, thanks.’ His face brightens as he hastily takes the passenger seat. He puts the briefcase at his feet.

I start the engine and steer the heavy car out into the wall of water. ‘I wouldn’t like to be hitching in this rain.’

‘I sure appreciate you giving me a ride,’ he says.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Rex.’

‘Vince.’

He looks over my shoulders and chest. ‘Are you a bouncer?’

‘No, a lawyer.’

‘A lawyer? I never met a lawyer before, like ... to talk to.’

‘You got rolled?’

It was mid-afternoon, near the police station, not far from the centre of town. They came up to him in a group, four or five of them.

‘Got a light?’ asked one.

‘Got any money?’ asked another.

‘Nah, get fucked,’ Rex said.

‘Give us the money or we’ll do you over.’

‘Get fucked.’

They beat him to the ground, kicking him as he lay there on the street. They took his money and his bag of clothes. They looked through his briefcase but left it because it was old and there was nothing in it they wanted.

‘I used to be a jockey,’ he says.

‘What made you give that up?’

‘I had to – I got too heavy. An’ I used to do break ’n’ enters. That was the time I met lawyers.’

‘What made you stop?’

‘Oh ... I got caught, an’ I got older ... Last few years I’ve been working up an’ down the coast – on farms an’ in the cane fields.’

‘Where you going now?’

‘Well I’m broke, so I’m going back to live with my mother for a while.’

Night has already fallen when I drive into town. ‘Not going any further tonight.’

‘I got a mate who lives here,’ he says.

With Rex giving directions, I drive into the suburbs. We pass row upon row of houses that all look the same in the night.

Rex points up ahead and to the left – one of many amorphous grey houses.

How does he know this one from the others? I pull over outside the house. The night is dark; rain still falls steadily.

Rex grabs his scuffed tan vinyl briefcase from the floor of the car. ‘Thanks for the lift.’ He opens the passenger door and is gone.

As I drive away I catch a fleeting glimpse of him in the glare of a street lamp – walking bent-over against the rain.

I turn the corner. Another street lined with wet grey houses. Something about that last glimpse of Rex. It seemed to tell the story of his life: walking bent-over in this world against forces bigger than him ...

Back out on the highway the rain beats against the windscreen. New rubber sweeps it away. Good to have the new wiper blades – I can see the road clearly now ... I stopped seeing into people ... when did it stop? I had the second sight when I was very young, before I went to school. And back then I also saw moving coloured lights in many places: red, yellow, blue, purple, and orange – little creatures of light floating in the air. Most times there were groups of them. Sometimes I’d see the lights near the ceiling as I lay in bed before going to sleep. One night I pointed them out to Dad: ‘there by the beam.’ He couldn’t see them. And I knew that before the look on his face told me so. He said ‘maybe they’re souls ...’

Chapter 3

The Big City

I drive into the big city where I misspent most of my twenties. Some of the carbon monoxide here must still be in my blood – I feel at home. I take a room at a cheap hotel in a quiet suburb by the river. My friend Keith once stayed here. He told us it was a ‘private hotel.’ I said it was his ‘doss-house.’ There were grins and laughs about the doss-house whenever it came up. When would Keith be getting out of the doss-house and into a flat? We have to help Keith get out of the doss-house. And he’d grin back, with his regular features, loose curly blond hair and straight white teeth, like he was being filmed in a toothpaste commercial. How Keith would grin now, if he could see me checking into the doss-house.

The manager’s jowls sag a little more. His white and pink skin is more worn and chipped. He doesn’t recognise me as he takes my money with his good hand. I don’t expect him to. My visits here had been fleeting and few – dropping Keith off and picking him up. He stows my money in the top drawer of the old wooden desk, picks up a ballpoint pen, bends over and writes my details in a blue hard-covered journal. He writes slowly, as if having learned to write again with this hand after losing the thumb and forefinger from the other. I see white flakes of dandruff in his thin, too-black hair. There’s a seeped-away emptiness about him. As if with each passing day a little more of his soul had ebbed away.

I phone Louis. We’ll meet at a city café. On the train into the city I think about Louis, and how we met. I was twenty-six, he was twenty-eight. He’d finished his bachelor’s degree in law the year before and had gone on to do a master’s degree. He turned up at the Law School in the early evenings after work, always impeccably dressed in a well-cut dark business suit, expensive English black shoes, white shirt and silk tie. There was a newness to his clothes – never a tired suit or frayed shirt collar. He liked talking, arguing, having an audience. The first time we met he began arguing with my Greek friend, Theo – my classmate from Securities Market Law.

‘Listen to me, Louis. I know about this,’ said Theo.

‘Why should I listen to you?’ said Louis. ‘You’ve got a big nose ...’

Theo’s big nose reddened, as did his cheeks. Theo picked up his brown briefcase and went home.

I didn’t know it then, but that was Louis restrained. When I got to know him better he’d often start in with ‘I’m a living God’ or ‘I’m a genius’ before telling his heroic deed or genius insight. He’d studied the Third Reich in great detail and thought Hitler ‘a great man.’ No more than ‘a few thousand’ Jews had died in the holocaust, he said. ‘During the war there was no food. A German soldier could be shot for stealing a loaf of bread.’

‘I have a Jewish friend,’ I said. ‘He’s a good person – kind.’

‘How well do you know him?’ he said. ‘Jews come into the community, big noses, big feet; and they try to make people feel sorry for them. That’s at the beginning. Over time, with sharp practice and all helping each other, they take over. And the smell ...’ He wrinkled his nose.

Louis is Sicilian. His parents are divorced. At the age of thirty-two, he still lives with his mother, Rosa, and his younger brother, Richard, who is thirty-one. Like most mothers I ever met, I get on well with her. It started soon after I learned to walk. The mothers would say ‘Oh, what lovely hair’ and within seconds I would feel a hand on my head squeezing my curls.

‘Just like one of my boys,’ Rosa said, a soft maternal look in her brown eyes. I was the guest for Sunday lunch with her sons, Richard and Louis. All her carefully prepared Sicilian dishes were spread out on the white tablecloth.

I smiled at her. ‘Thank you Mrs Romano.’ Looking at her across the table she didn’t look much older than her sons, Louis with her regular features and Richard with the rugged and charming face of his father. I wasn’t surprised when she said she was a teenage bride in the old country. She came out here with her husband and two boys when Richard was seven and Louis was eight. ‘Since the divorce things are better with the boys’ father,’ she says. ‘But he can still make me angry, like nobody else can.’

She then asked me whether I’d met Louis’ friend, Geoff Randall.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I don’t like him.’ She looked at Louis. ‘He really likes him.’

Louis smiled back at her. ‘Geoff’s alright ... you can’t put anything past him.’

Rosa looked at me. ‘He was always over here, never brought wine, or anything ... I told Louis, don’t bring him here anymore.’

I’d seen enough of Randall to know where she was coming from.

Richard then asked me if I shared Louis’ views about Jews.

‘I take people as I find them,’ I said. ‘I don’t care what race they are.’

‘Louis too,’ said Rosa.

‘There have been great Jewish writers,’ I said. ‘Arthur Miller is Jewish.’

‘Miller’s writing is nothing compared to Tennessee Williams,’ said Louis.

‘Tennessee Williams was a homosexual,’ I said.

Richard burst out laughing.

Louis went quiet. He never again talked up Tennessee Williams. And from then on when speaking of his brother, he would say ‘your fellow ideologue, Richard ...’

As the train pulls into the first city station I wonder why we became friends. What drew Louis and me together? We were both brown-eyed olive-skinned men in our twenties who had black hair and dressed in suits. We were born in other countries. And we both worked downtown. Louis was a lawyer in a large firm. Between lectures at the Law School I sold magazine subscriptions over the phone from a satellite office of a company based in another state. I walked fast between my office and law school – several times a day. Somehow, I was working and studying fulltime.

We shared a love of philosophy. I would quote from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil and Twilight of the Idols. Louis would quote from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation. Burning within us both was a need to live on our own terms, but the corporate world thwarted us. As Louis said, the key to success seemed not to be how good you are at your job; it was more about ‘how far you can get your tongue up another man’s arse.’ In a world where mediocre sycophants prospered and thrived, we lacked that necessary skill.

Downtown I worked out of a small, square, windowless internal office. A firm of accountants tenanted the floor. They didn’t need the space, so they sub-leased it to the company I worked for. The light was fluorescent, from tubes in the flat-panelled ceiling. There was just a desk, a phone, a couple of chairs and a three-drawer metal filing cabinet. I had no secretary, just a remote answering service and the black plastic alphanumeric pager that clipped onto my belt.

Anne worked down the hall. She was thirty-eight – the office manager for the accountants. Anne befriended me, called me Mr Global Tech, after the main magazine title I sold. I was away a lot – at lectures. Couriers sometimes arrived with deliveries to find my office empty. They looked around and wanted to be paid before leaving. Anne gave them my answering service phone number. I dealt with it and Anne didn’t charge for helping out.

One afternoon my small office became smaller. Anne opened the door, came in and closed it. ‘I’ve decided I want to have an affair with you.’

The walls and roof closed in. The fluorescent light retracted to a dull glow at the ceiling. I looked at her – saw a rose with drooping petals – overfull with the beauty of yesterday. ‘I don’t have time ...’

She left and closed the door.

The light came back. Walls and roof assumed usual positions.

We got along well enough. I might have taken her offer – if I’d had more time – and if she hadn’t made me feel like a piece of prey.

We love to laugh. Something else Louis and I have in common. I sit there on the train and drift back to a windy day in this city a few years ago. I see his laughing face and hear his laughter as it rolls with each gust of wind.

~ ~ ~

The city was busy with cars and cycle couriers and the lunchtime crowd of office workers out walking the streets. We were on our way from the Law School to a café for lunch. Louis walked beside me. His measured stroll and stare into the middle distance brought to mind a Machiavellian prince who had left the castle for his daily walk among the vassals. Gary Cox had tagged along, walking a couple of paces behind. Louis knew Gary from previous years at law school. Gary had been a late starter to student life. At forty-something he was still there completing the non-degree course part-time, while working in a government office. He hoped to work as a solicitor, one day. When I’d asked Louis why he let Gary hang around, he spoke of times of old when kings had court jesters.

Like me, Gary was from a country town. He had a small-town grin. Often it was the grin of an impish simpleton. At other times his grin said ‘how are ya mate?’ and ‘I know you’ll like me and accept me.’ Whatever the look on his face, the flicker in his eyes had the same childlike quality of being taken up with every person and thing around him. That flicker was always there, whether he was telling us he’d been a paratrooper (something only he believed), or that Louis had ‘the best bed and breakfast in town’ at home with Louis’ mum. And when could he move in?

And there was something provincial in the way Gary stomped along the street in his hometown department store plain-cut black suit, and solid black shoes. It was a toupee day. Some days Gary wore his obvious hairpiece – others he did not. Today the large mat of black hair was on his head. Sweat dripped down his forehead below the raised front of the toupee and gathered beneath his black-rimmed glasses.

I’d asked Louis about Marianna. She was his official girlfriend (he had several unofficial ones). Marianna was a twenty-two year old Sicilian nurse I’d never met. Louis said she was beautiful, and a virgin.

‘Marianna is for marriage,’ he said.

‘Don’t you want to have sex with her before you get married?’ I said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘My wife will be a virgin, past, present and de futuro.’

‘But when you get married, maybe the sex will be no good.’

‘No. When I hold her, I know it’s going to be good.’

Gary caught up. He’d stomped beside us for a couple of paces when a sudden gust of wind swept the toupee from his head. A bald horseshoe from forehead to crown was exposed. A perplexed look on his face, Gary watched the wind propel the toupee forty metres ahead and land limp in the gutter. Gary broke into a run, eyes fixed on his wind-ruffled bundle of hair. His short legs made quick stomping stabs at the footpath.

Louis’ grin broadened as he watched Gary run. And then Louis laughed ... it was like a deep well overflowing.

Gary bent down to grasp his toupee out of the gutter. His pudgy white hand almost touched it when another gust of wind picked up the toupee and carried it another fifty metres down the road.

Louis’ laughter overflowed again, and my own bubbling well joined his.

Gary set off again, eyes fixed on the black hairy thing settling in the gutter like the dried hide of a furry animal. Gary puffed as he ran. Again he reached down to pick it up and again a gust of wind took up the toupee and carried it seventy metres down the road. Gary straightened and ran after it.

Our wells of laughter overflowed again.

Gary was now far ahead. His short portly shape again bent to pick up the toupee, and again the wind denied him. Gary set off again; this time he only had thirty metres to cover. Finally, Gary scooped the toupee out of the gutter and held it tightly against his green polyester tie and white office shirt. Rivulets of sweat on head and face shone in the sun. He stood puffing on the footpath waiting for us.

Our laughter was pure, hard, and delirious.

Gary smiled. The look on his face was a strange mixture of embarrassment and pride. Pride in his victory over the wind and pride in the entertainment he had given us.

There were other times at Louis’ house. Like the time I came to Sunday lunch with Rosa’s accountant, Barack, and Barack’s brother, Eli. ‘They’re both Jews,’ Louis told me before the older men arrived, ‘so there can’t be any anti-Semitic comments.’ He said it to me as if making a mental note to himself. And Louis was the charming son at lunch, laughing at Eli’s jokes and saying ‘Barak, where have you been hiding Eli all this time? ... I would have liked to have seen more of him.’

One evening at Louis’ place I met his cousin, Marcus: a motor mechanic who smiled a lot. Louis and I were sitting in the living room with him. The television was on in the background. Marcus’ fingers and thumbs were big, his fingernails chipped. He had the hands of a man who worked with them. Words poured fast out of Marcus. It was as if he knew only one talking speed: full throttle. And when he talked his brown eyes danced with his words as if all of him was caught up in them. ‘Only the Aborigines came from here. Everyone else came from somewhere else.’ His intent child-like eyes looked at me, wanting to be sure I’d taken full benefit from his revelation, and liked it.

‘Right,’ I said.

Louis and I began talking philosophy while Marcus became absorbed in the TV news.

‘Look see,’ said Marcus, waving his arm at the television. ‘The bloody Jew – look see.’

Louis and I stopped talking and tuned into the news.

A new process had been developed for moulding plastic in the building industry; significant cost efficiencies were expected although it could take five years before the process was perfected. There were shots of industrial moulding equipment and interviews with men in white laboratory coats with high foreheads and glasses.

Marcus looked at us. ‘Look see,’ he said waving his arm, finger pointed at the TV screen. ‘The bloody Jew ...’

‘Jews ... err ... get into these industries,’ Louis said to me as if translating for Marcus, ‘and then ... through the banking system ... all the opportunities go to other Jews. It’s all interconnected.’

I smiled at Louis’ struggle for words. ‘Yes, I see the linkages ...’

Marcus smiled at us and shook his forefinger at the TV screen.

Louis turned back to me. ‘Schopenhauer had a different conception of the will ...’

‘Look see,’ said Marcus. ‘The bloody Jew.’ He waved his arm at the television.

Louis and I again turned to look at the TV screen.

The state government was planning to clean up the beaches by making sure any sewage was discharged many kilometres out at sea. There were shots of big waves coming in at sunny beaches, people swimming and surfing, followed by aerial shots of the deep ocean where the sewerage pipes would discharge and then an interview on the beach with a surfer in a wetsuit.

Louis didn’t bother explaining that one. He just looked at me as if to say ‘ignore him.’

‘I know,’ I said to Louis. ‘Nietzsche built on Schopenhauer’s conception of the will and took it further. For Nietzsche, human will is not passive, as Schopenhauer believed, but active, it is will to power. The struggle is about ascendancy. People only struggle to survive, as Darwin believed, when their survival is threatened.’

‘Look see,’ said Marcus waving his arm at the television. ‘The Jew, the bloody Jew.’

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the news item was now something to do with laundry powder. Louis and I kept on talking.

‘Look see,’ said Marcus, arm waving and forefinger pointing. ‘Look see – the bloody Jew ...’

~ ~ ~

The train stops and shakes me out of my reverie. The announcer calls out the name of the station and the next stops in his broad working-class accent. Why do all train announcers have such harsh accents? I settle back into my seat and my stream of thought. Yes, there was laughter. And above, beneath and in the middle of those surface things Louis and I had something in common: our main bond. We were both outsiders. There had been that familiar recognition within seconds – the unspoken ‘you and me, we’re not from here; our faces, yours and mine, they don’t fit’ – that sensing of lives being lived on the outside.

After Theo left that first evening Louis and I kept talking. After about twenty minutes the conversation turned to dressing for the office.

He looked at my light blue shirt, silk tie, navy suit and black shoes.