Jarrod didn’t seem like the right sort of a name for an old man he thought, glancing at his pensioner pass as he waited for the bus to take him into town. At seventy-two, he was beginning to see himself as old and thought that his name no longer matched his face and wondered why his parents, who were conservative in most things, had not chosen a name more appropriate for advancing years – George perhaps, or Matthew or Mark but not Luke. He knew a boy at school called Luke, a not very bright boy with scabby knees and nits who liked to use his fists in the playground and to spit a lot. For more than fifty years, Jarrod had a dim view of all Lukes.
He was the only passenger at the bus stop and there was talk that the newly privatised bus company was planning to change the route and no longer serve this part of the suburb. It was all to do with gentrification, Jarrod had said to his neighbour Tom, the only other long-term resident in a street that seemed more and more to be populated by young families in professional occupations, who filled the narrow street with their preposterously large cars that Jarrod liked to call ‘Urban Assault Vehicles’. A few people caught the bus into town of a morning to their office jobs and returned of an evening but there were no longer the small crowds of pensioners waiting at the stop to catch the bus into the city for some shopping, doctor’s appointments or to play bingo at the big Leagues Club in the centre of town.
Jarrod was heading into the office of the local newspaper where he hoped to place a notice at the classifieds desk. He had not been to the newspaper office for many years and hoped that they still took classifieds over the counter but suspected that they might not, and that he would have to call his niece, Amanda, and ask her to do it ‘online’. He wished that he had done a computer course and bought himself a p.c. for home use like his wife, Annie, had pestered him to do when he retired seven years ago, but he had resisted and now felt silly and that he had been a little bit selfish, because he now thought, too late, that perhaps Annie would have enjoyed using a computer to catch up with friends the way a lot of the young people, and much to his surprise, people his age and older, seemed to do.
The piece of paper that Jarrod was taking to the newspaper classifieds office was folded into an envelope and was in the inside pocket of his jacket, an old suit coat that still fitted across the shoulders but was tight across the belly. The pants had long ago ceased to fit, and he thought the suit itself was a waste of money since he had only managed to wear it to two weddings and four funerals before the pants became too tight. He would, in the next day or two, go to David Jones and buy another suit that might get some more wear because, at seventy-two, the funerals of people he knew were becoming more common. For that trip, out to the large suburban shopping centre, Jarrod would take a chance with the car-park and the suburban roads and drive his old Camry, but for trips into the city, it was always the bus.
The bus, Jarrod thought, was running late and should have been at the stop at ten past ten. He hadn’t realised that the new bus company had changed the timetable and he had relied on the printed copy that was stuck to the refrigerator by a magnet and had sat there, ready to be consulted for ten years. Annie liked to stick things to the door of the refrigerator and, over the years, had collected fridge magnets from all around the state during their annual holidays and, more recently, from the bus trips that she went on couple of times a year with the Combined Pensioners Club. Jarrod never went on the bus trips because it was mainly widowed women and he preferred to spend the time when Annie was away down at the Bowling Club having a few more beers than he would normally allow himself with the other old blokes, the ones that Annie referred to as his ‘cronies’. As he waited for the bus, he realised that there was no longer any restriction to the amount of time he could spend with his cronies at his favourite table at the far end of the bar overlooking the bowling greens.
Unlike the wives of some of Jarrod’s cronies who would come for the Friday raffles and then stay for tea at the bistro, Annie never came to the club. Annie would have tea on the table every night at five-thirty p.m. so that it could be eaten before the television news came on which she would watch while Jarrod did the dishes. After the news, Annie would read a book unless one of her favourite English murder mysteries was being screened. Jarrod didn’t care much for television himself apart from the Rugby League and now that it was the off season, he suspected that the television wouldn’t be turned on now until Autumn came around. He would turn on the wireless over summer and listen to the cricket on the ABC. Jarrod also liked to read and where Annie would read widely, Jarrod restricted himself to popular books about Australian history that were written by a retired rugby union player which he would borrow from the local library once per fortnight.
‘This place is full of history’, he thought to himself, waiting for the bus, ‘but most of it is invisible now’ and he wondered if he too was becoming invisible and hoped that the bus driver would see him and stop when it arrived.
When he was a boy of twelve or so, Jarrod wished that he could become invisible and then he could sneak into Mary Wallace’s house next door, and that he could stand and watch her in the bath. He didn’t have sisters and had never seen a naked girl, not properly naked, only the airbrushed pictures in the Man magazines that Dougie Boyle would nick from his old man and as both Dougie and Jarrod were starting to grow hair between their legs, they speculated that this might be the case for girls and wondered if Mary, who was the same age as Jarrod and Dougie, might have some ‘hair down there herself.’
When he was fifteen, Mary’s family sold their little house next door to Jarrod’s and moved to a bigger brand new house in the suburbs that they could afford on her father’s wages as a foreman at the steelworks and, because of the move, Mary changed schools and Jarrod never saw her again even though he had hoped that he might have bumped into her one night when he was an older teenager at the dance at the Palais on a Saturday night, because that’s where all the kids went and that’s where he met Annie and now, the Palais is gone as well. Another piece of invisible history.
The bus finally came around the corner and pulled up at the stop twenty minutes late according to Jarrod’s watch. The cranky driver told Jarrod, when he complained as he swiped his Opal card, that the bus was precisely on time according to the new timetable and that Jarrod needed to ‘get with the program’. Jarrod muttered some unkind words under his breath about the driver’s ethnic origins.
There were maybe four or five other people on the bus, all pensioners like himself and he took his favourite seat, three rows from the back with a window. He didn’t get to see the bus driver’s name badge but told himself that he wouldn’t be surprised if the driver’s name was Luke.
The bus headed down to the end of the street where it waited at the traffic lights to the entrance to the huge expanse of empty land that used to be the Steelworks. Jarrod remembered that when he was a boy, the street they were travelling along would be full of pushbikes when it was the change of shift at the plant, but the bikes had, over time, been replaced by car and then the plant closed down and was demolished. Jarrod thought that there seemed to be a resurgence of pushbikes on the roads these days but the riders were dressed differently with their lycra shorts and tops and no longer had Gladstone Bags tied to a rack at the back with a bit of rope and the bikes all looked like they might have cost a lot of money and hadn’t been cobbled together from a range of spare parts, found, bartered or stolen.
Jarrod still had the pushbike that he had ridden when he was a boy and kept riding until he bought his first motor car in 1972, after saving up some of the money he earned in his job in the office at the Dockyard. The bike had been gathering rust for many years in the back shed and Jarrod had initially kept it because he thought, when the time came, he might have liked to have given it to his son, but there was no son, and no daughters either. He wasn’t entirely sure of the reason why they couldn’t have children, but it was something to do with Annie and he never quite understood ‘women’s problems’ and that was all that she called it and wouldn’t discuss it other than to say it was between her and her doctor.
The bus made its way along the Industrial Drive and then turned at the big roundabout where all the oil and petrol tanks were and made its way into Carrington and Jarrod remembered that before he bought his car, he would take the bus on the same route when it was too wet or cold to ride his bike. The Dockyards closed down thirty-five years earlier and Jarrod lost his job and was unemployed for a while and they had to live of Annie’s earnings as a shop assistant at the posh department store at the bottom of the Mall in town. Something changed in those months before Jarrod got another job as a clerk at the steelworks and he couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but it was like Annie decided to assert herself because she was the breadwinner and Dougie Boyle, who was still mates with Jarrod, reckoned that Annie was wearing the trousers around the house. He was unemployed for a bit when the steelworks closed down but one of his colleagues put in a word for him and he finished his working life in the office at the big coal loader half way between where he used to work at the steelworks and where he used to work at the dockyard.
He was twenty-five when he married Annie and had been looking forward to celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary in a couple of years’ time with some of their friends and family. It was still a bit too far off to think about, and although Jarrod hadn’t discussed it with Annie, he had been starting to plan it and wondered where they might hold the event. He thought that she probably would have wanted something a bit grander than the Bowling Club, particularly if she invited some of her posh friends that she had still kept in touch with from the Department Store after it was closed down a few years ago in order to redevelop the site as part of the reinvention of the old city centre. He had thought of the yacht club that the bus had passed when it left Carrington but was worried that it might be a bit expensive and that they would probably want to serve more upmarket food than the sausage rolls and quiches and chicken wings that he could have easily afforded at the Bowlo. ‘Ah well’, he thought, ‘none of that matters now.’
He was surprised when the bus didn’t go all the way up the old main street like it used to and instead made a meandering journey around the shopping centre in the western end of the city. He got off when the driver grumpily informed him that he was at the last stop and when Jarrod said that he wanted to go all the way to the top of town, the driver told him he would have to walk down to where the new tram lines were in the main street, and that he had to tap his card off the bus and back on when he got on the tram. ‘Why does everything have to bloody change so much’ he muttered to the driver and then headed off to the tram stop.
Annie always kept up with the changes going on in the town and still insisted on having the local paper delivered every day so that she could keep up with the news and thought that all the new big building along where the wharves used to be was marvellous. ‘Destroying the soul of the city’ Jarrod would think to himself.
He caught the next tram and eventually got off near the Mall and realised how much it had changed since Annie worked at the department store and it seemed to have more cafés than anything else and he wondered if people these days did little else other than drink coffee.
He walked the short hill up to the newspaper office and when he reached the old art deco building, he found that he could not get in and that there was no signage for the paper and from the array of letter boxes and door buzzers he realised that the newspaper was no longer there, and it was now an apartment block. As he stood scratching his head, a young woman emerged, very well dressed in what Jarrod took to be expensive clothes with expensive jewellery and a hairdo he imagined to be fashionable.
‘Excuse me’ he said, and was a little intimidated by the way the tall woman looked over the top of her glasses at him and raised an eyebrow without saying anything, ‘I was looking for the newspaper office?’
‘It isn’t here anymore’ she said with a look that said that she didn’t have time for the chat.
‘Do you know where it is?’
‘It’s in one of those new buildings down on Wharf Road, near Steel Street’ she said and without another word, turned her back and walked down the street.
Jarrod retraced his steps and got back on the tram thinking what a bother this all was and wondered if the notice in the paper was even necessary, but the reason he was doing it was because a lot of people still read the paper and a lot of people wouldn’t have heard about Annie and would want to know. It was now getting close to lunch-time and Jarrod was hungry and had to think about what he would have for lunch. It had been easy for most of his life with his mother and then Annie packing him something to take to work in his plastic lunchbox and since he retired, every day at twelve noon, he would sit down to two corned meat and pickle sandwiches that Annie would prepare for him. He would need to go to the shop when he got back home because the little bread that was left in the house was stale and there was no more corned meat that he suspected Annie bought at the deli counter at their nearest suburban supermarket since the butcher on the corner two blocks away closed twenty years ago or more. He thought that instead of getting bread and corned meat, he could stop at the little take-away place where the butcher used to be and buy a pie without the worry of Annie’s disapproval of such an unhealthy lunch and perhaps, he could add in a sausage roll for good measure.
When he finally found it, Jarrod was surprised at how small the newspaper office was. The old building had been large and occupied multiple floors with rooms for reporters and sales people and admin staff and the printing presses out the back or in the basement, he wasn’t sure but knew they were on site and the main customer area was always busy and you had to wait in line to put your classified notice in, particularly if it was Friday morning and you wanted to make sure you made the cut-off for the popular Saturday edition. Jarrod wanted his notice to be published on Saturday because more people would read it.
When he opened the door to the newspaper office, there was just one narrow counter with a young woman sitting behind it wearing headsets and typing something into a computer.
‘Good morning, can I help you?’ the young woman said to Jarrod, not looking up from the screen.
‘I’d like to place a classified in Saturday’s paper.’
‘You know you can do all that online these days’ the young woman raised her eyes briefly from her screen.
‘I don’t have a computer’ Jarrod said.
‘Do you have your notice written down?’
Jarrod handed her the piece of paper and the young woman read it twice and then looked up at Jarrod and asked, ‘what section do you want it in?’
Jarrod was surprised at the question and thought that it was obvious from the content.
‘Don’t you have a section for divorce notices?’ he asked.