Before the Ending: Here & Now III

By S Sorrensen

Before the Ending is a selection of very short stories written by S Sorrensen and previously published in a local newspaper on the north coast of NSW in Australia. This book is an insightful, witty and often poignant look at life in the second decade of the 21st century – before the ending. Before the Ending need not be read from beginning to end, but may be opened anywhere. Let chance be your guide...

• Language: English
• Publisher: S Sorrensen
• Release date: Apr 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393806288

Book preview

Here. Now.

So, when the time comes, I want to be prepared. I hope you are too.

When the time comes, it will come rolling in like a dark wave over these green hills. The bird calls will be replaced by the roar of engines, the wail of sirens, and the blat-blat of gunfire. Helicopters will hover above the valley, like once did the wedge-tailed eagles, except that these noisier birds will flatten the corn, snap pawpaw tree trunks, and freak the wallabies into narrow lantana tunnels and copses of ironbark.

Trucks or Toyota utes or motorbikes will rumble up your driveway like a scene from Mad Max, or from the social media coverage of Aleppo, Mosul, Baghdad, Kabul, Donetsk, Chibok and Sana'a. (We are separated from these awful realities by the pixelated unreality of our screens. This separation protects us – it can't happen here, we think.)

Soldiers or looters or jihadists or neighbours – you can't tell who; they all are masked – will jump from their vehicles, armed with legal or illegal firearms, once designated as appropriate for law enforcement, sport or farm management, and will march up to the door of your house in the bush.

Or maybe not.

Maybe, when the time comes, it will be a slower tide, flooding these valleys with season after season of no rain. The lantana leaves will drop, forming a blanket of fire fuel beneath the ironbarks, angophoras and flooded gums. Your tanks will empty, the pawpaws shrivel and the green turn to brown.

Climate change, once a discussion topic around lattes at the local cafe, has come to where we live. Climate change, once a football kicked about to gain advantage in a stupid two-sided game we call politics, is now the kicker and is booting in changes to the great ocean flows. The 11,000 years of predictable seasons (the Holocene) that gave rise to agriculture and civilisation have ended.

You will want to move, but everywhere is the same. Drought and flood, fire and famine. No more latte chats over chocolate frangipane and cherry tart.

Or maybe not.

Maybe, when the time comes, it will be a disease made into a super sickness by a diet of antibiotics and farmed animals, and will travel from person to person, country to country via mosquito or Boeing – or simply waft on the breeze.

Or maybe not.

Maybe everything will be just as lovely as denial can make it: higher profits, smarter phones, better television series, cleaner coal, cheaper frangipane and cherry tarts, and we all come up Trump. (No way. Some scenarios are just too silly...)

I don't how the time will come, but the time is coming and I want to be prepared. I want you to be prepared.

I realise now that all we have is love. I won't take my bow and arrows up to the cave behind my shack under the cliffs to set up the last stronghold. I won't drag cartons of baked beans, jerry cans of water, batteries and a solar panel to the cave, carefully covering my tracks, so as not to be followed by the newly desperate. No. Love is the only preparation.

Humanity is not only the human genus Homo sapiens; it's also the human ability to love despite (or maybe because of) the chaos of our brief existence. Civilised life has crushed our humanity; has replaced love born from the transient magic of our shared moment in the sun with a mundane bundle of fear tied together with the lie of a religious or financial other life.

So, when the time comes, I want to be with you – to relearn our humanity, to ignite love in the wasteland of civilisation, to cherish the brilliance of our brief existence together.

Maybe the time has already come.

MONDAY

Brisbane, Qld. Monday, 11.25am

Those shoulders that once carried a radio pack into war, that once carried, with aplomb, the most elegant of suits, that once carried my toddling son around a backyard in Suffolk Park while dribbling a soccer ball, are now hunched over the task at hand: mounting the three steps to the porch.

He attacks this mission with the same resolute verve he has attacked all undertakings in his life.

Despite knees that have surrendered to time, the handrail is grasped, a swollen foot lifted, a step conquered. Despite an enervating melancholy fuelled by the awful reality that awaits us all at life's end, an instinct to win – honed by a life of tough challenges met – drives him on.

His wife awaits him at the top of the steps, two rivulets of tears escaping from behind large sunglasses. This is their home. Or at least it was. Now he lives in a care facility, because the increasing demands of his care have outgrown the capability of her own frail body to meet them.

This is his first visit back.

With his future shrunk so small that there's no room for denial of death, he has one wish: to sit again on the porch. To sit with his wife.

He breathes heavily as he climbs the second step. His feet are sore in their bandages and slippers. He flinches with pain. His wife twitches with anxiety. Life for them is not what it was.

We live in a society that is built on denial. We don't die. (Or, at least, we don't talk about it.) We obey the rules, work hard, invest wisely, and retire to a billboard with grey hair, uncataracted eyes, white teeth and a manicured golf course. End of story.

But, the story doesn't end there. Oh no.

Where is the billboard showing the yellow skin, the shrunken muscles, the fearful eyes? Where is the billboard showing the secret life of the elderly – isolation, depression and daytime television?

Compared to this, the war was a piece of cake. There's no denying a Japanese bomb. You accept it, and then fight it. Or run from it. Who knows? You may survive it.

But old age... no way you survive that. No matter how fat your investment portfolio is. No matter how ridiculous your religion. No matter how immortal your Facebook page. There is no bunker to shelter in, no anti-mortality gun to shoot, no beer afterwards back at base.

In a society where acquisition of stuff and compliance to a corporate agenda is the main game, accepting the reality of death runs the risk of exposing the absolute emptiness of materialism, the void at the very centre of capitalist culture. So, shut up and buy something.

He reaches the summit, having scaled the Everest of steps. My hands, supporting him, feel the rasping lungs, the racing heart. I lower him into his chair. His wife, my mother, pulls a chair close to his, and sits in it.

Getting his breath back, he looks to his wife, and raises his hand towards her. She clasps his hand in hers, and pulls it to her cheek. Her rivulets of tears are now in flood. He cries too, but through the tears his old eyes flash an understanding.

A smile cracks his face – a smile I haven't seen in ages.

It's a smile that celebrates the moment, the here and now (which is all we ever really have, anyway).

A smile that acknowledges the triumph of love over death.

He teaches me much, this super man.

––––––––

Lismore. Monday, 7.30am

The Wilsons River is brown, solid and muscular, shouldering its way through parts of Lismore it's not supposed to go in. And the peak of the flood was yesterday, while I was nestled in my shack in the clouds, flooded in by a tributary, listening to the drumming rain and Harry Belafonte.

Today, the river is still wrangling with human habitation, dancing in retreat, but the river don't care. The sun reflects off its smooth skin; the rain has moved south leaving three birds surveying the changed landscape from their vantage atop a streetlamp with no street. Everything is cleaned. Lovely.

And the river is the prettiest thing that ever lived.

Even though it looks pretty, the river ripples with power. It's Muhammad Ali, bobbing and weaving around brick barbecues, marooned street lamps and 'No skateboard' signs, taunting them: 'I don't have to be what you want me to be.' 

I like it when the river floods.

The river lunges out from its corner in the Nightcap Range and mounts an attack against the structures and strictures that humans have punched into the landscape.

If modern life is a bout between human expansion and the environment, then around here the flooded river is the environment's pugilist. It's Muhammad Ali, floating like a butterfly to land a stinging hook to the glass jaw of human endeavour in Lismore.

Lismore, a town that largely ignores the river, has to take notice when the river flexes its muscle. Lismore turned its back on the river (literally) when roads became the arteries of commerce and the last ships left the river in the '60s, leaving the wharves to rot away, their stories leaching into the river like so much fertiliser, to end up in the Ballina tales old people tell.

Before Lismore (ironically named after an island in Scotland), the Wiyabal people knew the power and glory of the river. They didn't dirty it, neglect it, push it around like some punch-drunk has-been. It was a mighty waterway, healthy and strong, according to Henry John Rous who sailed up it in 1828. Then the fight began...

I like flood time. The river breaks free of its banks (I wish I could) and takes a walk in the park, a stroll up the street, spends the night in the gutter. People gather at the water's edge to watch the emancipated river jab at suburban foundations, go toe-to-toe with municipal infrastructure.

Council doesn't like people to be out and about enjoying the flood. 'Stay at home,' it says. 'Check the website.' Well, bugger that. Unlike internet updates, radio reports, and television news, the flood is real. Thousands of smartphones were flooded before the flood even existed; before the first raindrop fell. For many people, reality is an anticlimax, a shadow of the main event. And not just with floods. That's sad.

Go look at the flood, I say. Touch it. Gather in groups, bring an esky. Behold the power that country has – despite the bruising we give it. The more we brawl with it, the more punishment it takes, the weaker we get. Now check out the river, coming off the ropes, saying, 'I am the greatest.'

A levee was built to protect business assets in the CBD, and, so far, the river has