Black Eye Friday

Darkness before dawn permeated by the trotting feet of birds on the roof and the occasional glimpse of them dropping from the sky – still they chatter less than some and when they do they open their mouths for a reason – maybe it’s xmas, maybe it’s just me, but I am craving silence like milk or water – the opportunity to be still, necessary, to hear something beyond the gabble –

Succumbing to a nightmare – I am looking to buy a house in Australian and then emigrate – I pay a visit (along with a few other prospective buyers) to a new development out in the country: dry scrubland, unidentifiable birds, the odd lizard, red earth – to what is at first a number of dilapidated properties in the process of renovation, detached blocks dotted throughout the landscape and connected by a single dirt track – we are shown the one closest to completion: the location of the swimming pool blah blah etc etc – I am at first enamoured of the place and start to make those little plans for decoration in my head – then we are guided towards other parts of the development, larger building to be converted into flats, municipal looking outhouses and sheds, some in better condition and located in a shallow valley surrounded by dense foliage, a pretty enough place – I ask what the site had been before it was purchased for this project and the lead salesmen, a chubby man in a poor fitting shirt, says ‘oh some Castro types, fascists, had it for what they say was training; they used to do some bad stuff here.’ I wanted to tell him that Castro wasn’t a fascist but he waved me over to a hole in a breeze block wall: ‘Come look at this,’ he said. He pointed a torch in there illuminating a dark and damp square room and on the far wall some neo-political graffiti with slogans about purity and the extermination of various races and religions; there was a green Star of David daubed there and blackened with age, some weird stick-man type Aborigine being poked with a stick of some kind that had sparks coming out of the end, a cattle-prod, and another slogan that said ‘killing Arabs with thanks to Camus.’ The group of five or so potential buyers looked upon the place now with horror and when we turned back the entire development, the whole place had taken on a sad and bleak air; the peeling paint and dark windows were now replete with unseen horrors. People muttered; a woman shed tears and her husband put his arm across her shoulders shaking his head. The chubby man explained that he and his business partners were attempting to make good history, to bring a new meaning to the place. They had hoped of course that none of this would have come out, that the condo could have been completed and a new light could have shone on the location looking forward to the future. But something had a grip on him now and he mentioned that there was a grave pit over at the far edge of the site that they had plans to build either the local school on or else a supermarket and restaurant complex.