6 pm and it seemed the universe unloaded.
All the information screens were down, and every train was late and wrong. Flemington Race Course must have had a major race meeting, and it was time to bring the animals home.
Each and every red faded diesel arrived and with its doors open filled the station with an expelled hot sweet hair carrying wafts of beer, cheap perfume and stale white wine.
The post modern pheremones of a nation slowly falling apart. Older women propped up by deferential old men seemed filled with water. They sloshed from side to side, saddle bags and breast bags swinging out of step and rhythm with the rest of them. A kind of sideways counter beat. A staccato wave of jewels, furs Napoleon Purdis Pharmaceuticals and a liquid fatty pig pink flesh 3 times the volume of the skin holding it in. Breathless drunk tired and smelly. Waddling immaculate. Watching a world of escalators through thin watery slits and yellow whites and cataracts. The sky closes in.
Their younger counterparts are half pissed and up for it, parading to no-one in particular – pouting and licking the air with sexual entitlement. A come fuck me attitude. Now. Now… It’s so urgent. Such a strange notion – decency.
And then there are all the young dudes. Some of them know and some of them don’t. This way. The chicks. Here and there, doing this and that. Staying together out of fear and knowing if they are to score they have to break from the pack. None do, and they bump into things, sitting down and falling over. Laughing when it’s not funny and no one has said anything.
Another red rattler squeals to a stop. Brakes straining into the station and people tumble out like a cascade of coloured plastic jewels from a childs tiara. Waterfalls of raked tits, hot cunts and goofy shoes stamped with ostrich or crocodile embossing. Yellow and sky blue. More boys gather in groups, shouting. Some vomit on their shirts and onto the station floor. Like they were alone and private, standing up and looking about as if they had just woken from a dream. They run about trying to impress – trying to figure out how to make contact, trying to figure out how to check the tits without looking at them and trying to figure out how to get one down on the floor, arse up and on their knobs by 7pm. Begging.
They’ll wake no doubt tomorrow at 11, too sick and weak to remember what the fuck went on, who they did and where they spent that last $600 bucks on. The hired suits will need to be returned, and they will lose all of their deposits.
All of this. With nothing left to show but a pair of size 10 panties made by ‘L’amour’ in Korea with a stiffened stain that smells of musk and looks like someone spilled glue all down the front..Owned by Anonymous or Candy embroidered on the front in silver thread theyll make up stories of what she did, what she said, how she was this and that and how hot. and it will all happen all over and over…
Tonight sometime a few will end up throwing up lobster across the back seat of someones father’s brand new Beemer and wondering if Mum will need to get involved. And the insult will be even more disturbing because he knows the Prime Minister and works at Monash University. Oh the horror.
I look down.
In a few moments they’ve all gone. The old fluid waddlers and the young and and the broody the wannabe breeders and just the plain fucked. The station is quiet save for someone playing a lonesome harmonica on platform 4 and a Pakastani cleaner pretending to be Pavarotti on number 7, and a Rowandan woman with a pram and a can of coke 20 feet from me. Smoking so that from behind it looks like her heads on fire. Nothing she hasn’t seen before.
And me. Wondering. How much time do I have left. Wondering if it has been worthwhile and if any of it has been important.
