The radio says there’s an overnight storm arriving at 1am, so he sets the alarm clock on the floor of his room, beside his mattress in the bare apartment. After twenty years of marriage he was almost back to living in a student share house, but he discovered a cheap one bedroom across town that’s as empty as his allocated car park. He knew calling it quits meant financial disaster, now he’s renting for the rest of his life. He needs time to find his feet and he’ll find them soon, a lie that he’s telling his kids.
The storm driving in is meant to get wild. It’s been weeks since the last one hit. He’s been trying to keep busy with twelve-hour shifts and watching dvds on the laptop. He barely earns enough to contribute to school fees, meet rent and buy fresh food. It takes a month of saving to go on a date because he pays for her meal like a gentleman. Is this what he chose, this separateness, a life he can barely afford? Travelling is out, so he rides each storm, like the one that’s coming in tonight.
His alarm starts squawking like a pirate’s macaw, so he slaps it in the face. What he’s about to do might be an ancient pastime, which makes him feel less pathetic. The gale is battering every angle outside, beating windows in aluminium frames. The gutters are clogged and the rainwater falls, splattering on the concrete beneath. He’s half asleep as the storm hauls the trees, a branch scraping the corrugated fence. A new world has arrived that doesn’t cost a thing, so he lies there just like he’s practised.
He imagines he’s travelling in the bowels of a ship, as if everything led to that. He’s on an adventure, far off the coast, in a liminal wave of chaos. He’s alone but seafaring, lurching along to a destination that’s bound to come—the eye of a storm, the ocean bed or calm water with a fine horizon. Wherever he’s going, something is happening and he’s been waiting for something so long. Tonight it’s as if he rebuilt his life, going places after years of coping.
He stays in that ship as long as he can, before the storm passes and sleep returns, before morning and the choices he’ll have to make, like what he’ll cook just for himself. One day he’ll remember that man on the floor imagining beneath the covers. He’ll have company then, a new wife perhaps or maybe an irregular lover. No one will know that he’d wake at night while his kids across town slept through. But there must be others in their own low ships, with only weather and a way to be.
Nathan Curnow lives in Ballarat and is a past editor of Going Down Swinging. His previous books include The Ghost Poetry Project, RADAR, and The Apocalypse Awards (Australian Scholarly Publishing). He has won numerous prizes and appears regularly at festivals across the country, although he is often thrown by his notes.