Six Hundred

By Martin Chambers

Six Hundred.
Most of these stories are short, six hundred words or so. It is a length that requires word discipline, not long enough for flowery prose or complicated scenarios but long enough to create movement. Just as an artist might paint a portrait with the subject gazing off to the side, or looking directly to us with an enigmatic smile that reveals the fact of a secret without us knowing what the secret is. It is the difference between writing a scene and a story, and it has value because it moves us. We might think or we might feel, but after a good story we are not the same. We, the reader, have moved.
Some of this collection have been placed in competitions only to be rejected later by anthologies, others published yet overlooked even for the short list. But then, who can know the mind of competition judges or editors? You can judge for yourself.
The point is here is a collection of short short stories that vary from sweet tales of children to sad ones, stories of murder perhaps, science fiction as aliens arrive to speculate what life might be like on this small planet, and stories that will challenge the grammar police or rummage inside the head of the reader as only the written word can. In other words, something for everyone.
This collection began as a series of ‘Stories to read on the bus’. We are told no one reads anymore and this is why book sales are down. Yet on the bus you will see many with their head in a book. Young people and old, from gothic fantasy to thriller romance, reading, their world not the one we see through the bus window.
Others have their small screens and probably if I could sneak a look, pictures of cats doing adorable things. I too have Facebook and the marketing people tell me to increase my reach I must post pictures. Curate not create, they say.
Well I am a writer and I create, and being bloody minded I began to post short stories, words, no pictures. As a picture tells a thousand words that became my aim. Less than a thousand words to rival a cat, to drag you from the screen into a world with myriad possibilities. Where a character looks out from his bus, the bus we all ride on, and as he smiles enigmatically you wonder what it is he sees.
So here is a month of bus trips. I hope you enjoy.
Cover picture is ‘Lake Ballard’.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Martin Chambers
• Release date: Oct 31, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370860968

Martin Chambers

Born in Perth, Western Australia, in 1957. Studied Veterinary science. Worked as publican, field assistant, ferry skipper, salesman, and white water rafting guide. Best job was Quality control at the Swan Brewery (true!). Lives in Perth with wife and two adult daughters. Writes travel articles, short stories, poetry and fiction.

Book preview

I was due at the festival venue at nine. I got ready early but when I came downstairs I saw that rain had intensified and there was no way I could walk the few blocks and stay dry. On the footpaths a few pedestrians were battling with umbrellas in the wind, and across the road at the bus stop people were crowded together in every small piece of shelter. They’d make room for me but by the time the bus came I’d probably be soaked.

I decided to take a taxi. While the receptionist phoned I saw vision on the TV in the foyer of thousands of taxi’s parked outside the parliament building, but the sound was turned down and the scroll bar told me that Barlow was to miss the state of origin match. The receptionist hung up the phone and said they would send the first available taxi.

‘How long?’ I asked.

‘First available,’ she repeated. ‘There is a protest meeting.’

‘But how long? I have a conference. Anyway, what is the protest about?’

‘Uber,’ she said.

It took me no time at all to sign up and click agree to all the conditions without reading them. I ordered a car and driver and while I waited the five minutes I watched the TV. It now had vision of a coral reef someplace, and a scientist chap speaking, with the scroll bar announced that the taxi protest was about the unfair advantage of Uber drivers. Apparently they did not pay tax and they did not have to pass any driving test or even buy a taxi licence. I wondered idly how all the Nigerian and Indian taxi drivers in this western city could afford to buy taxi plates that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. I had some sympathy for them. Probably they had arrived as refugees and saved hard to eventually buy into a taxi. They were small business owners really and I sort of agreed it would be unfair to allow advantage to a new competitor.

But I had to be somewhere so I could not afford to be too sentimental. I stood at the glass window of the foyer and saw a near new white car pull up. It was in much better condition than most taxis. I ran from the building and quickly got in the back. The driver was well dressed and the inside of the car was clean. Not new, but certainly as good as any taxi and I was thinking that if this was the Uber standard taxi drivers had good reason to be concerned. Although going on strike probably wasn’t that smart, as people like me now had an opportunity to discover Uber.

‘Take me to the Conference Centre,’ I said. He should have known already because when you book an Uber vehicle you have to say where you are going, but the driver had given me a quizzical look as I got in. Maybe this Uber system wasn’t so faultless after all. He looked confused but I was in a hurry so I interrupted him as he began to speak.

‘Look, I’m due at the Conference Centre. I’m the keynote speaker so I really can’t be late. Just get me there quick as you can.’ Then I added ‘Thanks.’ I had been a bit abrupt.

He began to answer me but a car behind tooted as we were now holding up the traffic.

‘Whatever,’ he said. He seemed a bit short tempered and again I wondered that perhaps Uber needed to do work on recruitment and customer focus.

At another time I might have chatted with him and found out more about Uber, but during the ride I leafed through my notes for the speech for I find last minute nerves are best dealt with by scanning my ideas. At one point the driver asked me what was on at the Conference Centre so I told him about my paper, and he seemed impressed. He said he’d drop me at the turnoff where I could walk under the covered walkway all the way to the entry, and I did not complain because I knew how busy he and all the Uber drivers must be what with the rain and the taxi strike. I offered him $20. He gave me his funny look again and laughed.

‘Don’t be silly.’

I got out and he drove off. It seemed odd he did not want to be paid. Maybe he thought I was important enough to warrant a freebie. I wasn’t sure what Uber’s policy on that was. Certainly I had never had a taxi give me a free ride.

While waiting at the security check I took out my phone to confirm it was on silent. It was, but I always double check these things. I noticed I had several messages from Uber.

‘Car waiting as ordered.’

‘Car is waiting for you. Delay may incur a waiting charge.’

‘Still waiting, please reply if no longer required.’

‘Car arrived 8.27am, driver waited 20 min but could not contact you. Your account will be charged waiting time and cancellation fee as per our terms and conditions.’

Song for love.

Truman carried the marimba into the classroom and set it up near the teacher’s desk. The room was quiet, and would be for another fifteen minutes until the students finished their lunch. He pulled the teacher’s chair across and began to play gently, no thought of a particular tune, just single notes that he would let hang in the still air of the room.

The room was cluttered, a typical junior art room. Hanging from the ceiling were papier-mâché sculptures that only a nine-year-old knew what were, and along the wall pots with paint brushes and pencils or boxes of craft things, and every flat inch of wall was posted with some crayon art, even over the windows so that a student could not sit and gaze at the outside, at the trees and oval and the sky or clouds, at birds and all the freedom they had.

Truman remembered his own schooldays, a happy sad time of watching the world outside the window as inside the boys passed notes to the girls who whispered secrets to each other and the teacher who picked on Truman for not paying attention and then the others laughing at him. Of wishing he could whisper his own secrets and of who he might whisper them to.

Despite the clutter the sound in the room was good. The notes resonated and soon, without conscious thought, it became a tune. He played ‘Song for Love’, not the way it had become popular when cover bands played it, but how he had written it. Slowly. He played it the whole way through, and then stopped, allowing a new silence to fill all the spaces between the children’s work.

‘Very nice.’

Truman turned and saw a man leaning on the doorframe.

‘Thanks. Did you hear it all?’

‘From along the corridor.’

‘Oh.’

‘Song for Love.’

‘Yes.’

The man was large. Overweight, although he did not look unhealthily so. He was dressed casually, almost sloppy, as if he did not care about how he looked or what people thought of him. His voice was soft. Truman wondered if he was a singer, for the thought came to him that the man’s voice would match the gentleness of the marimba with the same quality that hinted it could be very loud if it needed to be.

‘Play some more.’ His voice caressed the air between them.

Truman laughed, and while the two of them watched each other he absently dragged the hammers along the keyboard so there came a sound like the washing of a mountain stream over rounded river stones. The man laughed in return, and then, after a pause while the room measured the stillness, he began to sing, high, falsetto, pure notes that might have been words to a song that only those who closed their eyes and allowed the sound to envelope them would understand. A song in a language not spoken.

With his eyes closed Truman let instinct guide his hands, slowly at first, playing single notes to both follow and lead the singing. It was as if they were dancing, the marimba and the voice, Truman and this comfortable stranger.

It may have been no more than a few minutes when the school siren blared, high and loud, penetrating, and within seconds there came the percussion of small feet in an outside hallway. A door banged.

‘Seeya,’ the man said.

He disappeared from the doorway. Moments later a horde of boisterous children crowded in but Truman only half heard them. He was thinking about the past and the future and the time he wrote the song for love. That time was gone, that song was done, but maybe, sometime soon, he might be able to compose something as good.

Alba and Zebra

On Monday morning Mrs Donaghue the lollypop lady made them wait for a family of ducks to cross the road. She told all the kids to stand very still so they wouldn’t scare the ducks, and she held up her lollypop while the mother duck led nine little ducks to the other side. All the cars waited.

Alba said to her sister how it was good the ducks knew to use the zebra crossing, and the two