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suitcase
They were all heading off to a nightclub called Fascination Street (which I thought was taking Goth pretension just a little too far), but I was going home, so I crossed the road and sat down at the tram-stop diagonally across from them. A tram arrived almost immediately, sweeping them off to another night of drunken debauchery, tense dramatic situations and that goddess-awful techno version of the Carmina Burana. I was left waiting for the number six to glen iris. Supposedly, there was one every sixteen minutes, but I'd learned to regard tram timetables as a variety of gonzo fiction; they have only a passing relationship to reality. I sat down on the green-painted metal-slat seat and shivered. There had been some interesting-looking posters for local bands, but they'd been torn down, leaving only enough detail for me to be able to appreciate the amount of work that had gone into them. More pointillist dots than Virgil Finlay or even Matt Howarth could comfortably deal with. It made me wish I had a portable hand-scanner. After exhausting the entertainment possibilities of the graffiti (which were showing a sad trend towards names and initials, away from scatological poetry or even political commentary), I noticed the suitcase. I was certain it hadn't been there when I'd arrived; I would have tripped over it. I looked around, but no-one was there. I would have seen them. Hell, I would have heard them; the street was empty, no cars, the shops closed long ago. So, this suitcase had just appeared, or (more likely) I'd hallucinated an empty space where it had been. Working under the premise that it didn't belong to anyone and was therefore in the public domain, I decided to investigate it. It was old, dark-brown, made of thick, treated cardboard with vinyl straps holding it closed; aged, chromed snaps with black specks of rust, vinyl patches reinforcing the battered corners; one faded blue travel-sticker with letters in some obscure version of Cyrillic; worn brown plastic handle. It felt light, as if empty; shaking it, I could feel several soft somethings flopping around inside, like towels or T-shirts. I considered opening it, but just then I heard a tram approaching; I put it down underneath the seat and turned to hail the tram. as I did so, I felt an overwhelming sense of sadness, abandonment; very much the last-kitten-in-the-pet-store kind of feeling. It was coming from the suitcase. It kept coming and didn't stop until I picked it up and got on the tram with it. The feeling stopped as soon as the tram started moving. I put it down on the seat next to me and disregarded it, as if it was another passenger. Twenty minutes later when I got up to leave, it didn't beg me to pick it up again. i caught a glimpse of it through the glass-paned door as the tram rumbled off. Since then, I've seen it around, occasionally being ferried on or off trams by whoever happened to be handy, a different person each time. It seems to be travelling between Prahran and Brunswick, although I did once see it on the Frankston line train. Sometimes, I wave. |
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