NIGHTSHIFT

Editor's Note: readers will get a better feel for the pacing of this hallucinogenic short-story, through a desktop or laptop, as the formatting is finicky with mobile. Driving through the streets of Fitzroy at night you

become obsessed with streetlight and the sound of

an imagined disturbance occurring in flat thirteen

on the twenty fifth floor of the Brunswick St.

commission flats. In daylight, there is little to see

but a urine stain on a tram shelter seat. An old stiff

with a grey beard named Jimmy calls to you

unintelligibly from the other side of the street. You

wish that you were somewhere else; perhaps

wandering along a path beneath a mountain in the

bush...

But no. 


You are up against a brick wall. Forever

waiting to be released from the pain that is

synonymous with the stiff named Jimmy who sits

the day out on Death Row while trams travel along

gentrified Gertrude St.

Jimmy isn’t a bad man, but he’d snip you for

twenty dollars if he could. He sits in his tram

shelter, one foot across a thigh, digging splinters

of glass out of the soles of his bare feet. The

memories emanating from the grey hair covering

his scalp are all he has for company. Nobody

bothers about old Jimmy, so he creates imaginary

friends in order to deflect the pain circulating in

his head.

Jimmy once drove a cab at night. One morning,

when the encroaching daylight had washed

another junkie’s brains into the gutter, he drove

home and had breakfast. While sitting at the

kitchen table he saw what he believed was a worm

wriggling in his buttered toast. He placed a finger

in the marmalade jar and dabbed a touch of ginger

in the direction of the worm’s mouth. It promptly

slurped the marmalade off his finger, smiled, and

in Jimmy’s mind, thanked him for the secretion.

The worm then crawled beneath his fingernail and

entered his bloodstream through a crack in his

skin. Jimmy quietly explained this to his mother;

she blessed herself, kissed her son between the

eyes, then made him a dish of pear and pineapple

pieces hoping that something fruity would prepare

her son for the nightshift.

After breakfast Jimmy read the Neos

Cosmos. As the heat of the afternoon drew near he

retired to his bedroom and studied an old high

school history report. He dropped off to sleep

riding the gratification obtained from reading a

comment his teacher had made:

‘Jimmy is a very bright boy who does no

work’.


As he dozed the worm that he believed had

earlier entered his bloodstream fused with the

memory of Mrs. Logan’s words until a further

sentence was tacked onto the end of the history

report:

‘Jimmy is a very bright boy who does no

work. For punishment, he must clean up the

streets’.

His mother woke him at 4.00 pm. She

knocked on his bedroom door then marched into

his room and checked him for dysentery. (Her

husband had been killed fighting the fascists in the

mountains of Northern Greece. He had been a

Greek resistance fighter, who, when captured by

the Italians, had been forced to sit unchecked in a

cell for nine months until an Italian soldier had

walked in one morning unannounced and

asphyxiated the prisoner using Jimmy’s father’s

own excrement. Since the knowledge of that foul

act had reached Jimmy’s mother she had remained

petrified by the presence of faecal matter. She

sensed it everywhere: under the stairs, in the

refrigerator, hiding out surreptitiously under the

model bridge Jimmy had constructed in the

backyard of their home and which acted as a

monument over the fish pond he had built in

memory of his dead father). Jimmy was free of

dysentery, but the worm that he believed had

burrowed beneath his fingernail earlier that day

had increased in size during the five hours he had

been asleep. He now heard and felt Mrs. Logan’s

command circulating in his arteries and forcing its

message through veins, onto blood vessels; which

then pumped her command into each muscle of

Jimmy’s body until his arms, legs, head, toes and

feet were ready to put this command to work and

quote:

‘...clean up the streets.’
Unquote. 


Later, Jimmy sat at the kitchen table, bread

crumbs clinging to the sleeve of his shirt, gazing at

his features in a hand held mirror his menopausal

mother had once used when plucking her

eyebrows and waxing her bikini line.

His mother entered the kitchen through a rear

door with orange worry beads ensconced in her

left hand and muttering ‘Hail Mary’ in unorthodox

Greek; this was Jimmy's cue to hit the street. He

placed the mirror on the kitchen table and

dismissed the furrowed brow that now followed

him through the flywire door - Jimmy unaware of

its presence between his black Kalamata eyes -

and into Vere St.

Outside, a local street urchin dangled the

entrails of a ginger tom cat on a bamboo stick, saw

Jimmy, twirled the mess several times, and

released it. The entrails slapped on the driver’s

side windscreen of Jimmy’s Silver Top Holden

Kingswood.

Jimmy could have murdered the child;

indeed, should have murdered the child. This kid,

along with all the other kids that played in

Jimmy’s region, who refused to play anywhere

else, was a constant reminder of his semiconscious

desire to kill off ‘The Child’. If Jimmy wanted to

achieve this ambition he would have to transcend

himself and become a red eyed battalion of

tungsten, human protein, and simple stainless

steel, put together and integrated with various

weaponry, some obvious, some not so, into a two

tone, white hot, come as you are to the party

killing machine.

The sun slithered across the roofs of houses

and all its grace and splendour was lost in

sawtooth alcoves and sheets of rusty corrugated

iron. Jimmy held the ginger tom’s entrails in one

hand while its pancreas remained lodged between

the taxi’s wiper blade and windscreen. He hurled

the entrails after the retreating child then lunged

for the pancreas with the intention of removing it.

Unluckily for Jim his intellectual faculty kicked in

and he was quietly impressed by the proud

pancreas’ emanating theoretical value. As the

saying goes, and this is not one I would use in any

other context I assure you, Jimmy was about to

‘Bust his Pooper’.

The worm which that morning had slipped

beneath Jimmy’s chipped fingernail and

manoeuvred its way into his bloodstream

permeated his mind. He now believed it had

receded, recidivist worm that it was, into the

compartment in his brain that contained traces of

zinc, iron oxide, lead, sulphur and bauxite, and

which had been secreted there by the monumental

amount of illicitly made amphetamine Jimmy had

injected in a previous attempt at killing off ‘The

Child’. With worm and heavy metals in tow - and

an undissolved preservative attached to a jelly

crystal he had eaten as a child - Jimmy was ready

to inflict harm upon the nearest pederast he could

find.

The sun was completely hidden in alcoves

and side streets as the nightshift began with ginger

tom’s pancreas flapping insistently on the

windscreen; a constant reminder to Jimmy of the

fun filled days he had been forced to spend with

his mother. All of which culminated in a desire to

whip the blade of his paint scraper across the

carotid artery of ‘The Child’.

A voice cackled into life on the two-way

radio. It was Mary Kyrikilli, the depot manager’s

wife. The job involved picking up an elderly

couple in Surrey Hills wanting a lift to the over

seventy five’s dance in Canterbury. What Jimmy

heard was this:

“You have a function to fulfil at 666 Fitzroy

St. St. Kilda. Be quick, for the scum is sliding off

the street and receding into drains then catching

the first train to outer Elsternwick. We applaud

your meticulous preparations for performing the

task of killing ‘The Child’. We respect your

commitment to cleaning up the streets and

replacing unredeemed low life with flesh powered

by pink spark plugs. We recognise your brain’s

ability to assimilate organic material, heavy metal,

and static electricity. We admire the organism you

have become Jimmy: your quilled fingers,

tungsten breast plate, metal teeth, and plumber’s

worm for a tongue. We implore you to unleash this

flexible spike from your mouth and reach into the

decadent minds of the scum who surf Fitzroy St.

You are the future Jimmy... Do you read me?”

Mary’s voice fractured into an orangutan’s

outraged scream that pierced Jimmy’s skull,

ramming the shears into the soft skin beside his

forehead. His eyes crackled with green intensity.

He pressed the cab’s accelerator to the floor,

picked up the receiver, and responded to Mary’s

call:

“Clear as the night sky seen from the planet

Venus”.


His cab rocketed past a sex shop in Smith St.

just as its pot-bellied, red moustached proprietor

stepped out for a breather.

“That’s odd”. The proprietor lit a cigarette

and inhaled deeply.

“There’s a cab without its lights on”.


Excessive exposure to the Kama Sutra, jet

propelled semen, and pink pelvic interiors pierced

by nuts and bolts, wooden pegs, and surgical steel

curtain rings eventually overwhelm the most

sophisticated thinkers. The proprietor stepped back

inside, but not before carelessly flicking his half-

finished cigarette into the sky - and there it

remained, frozen. The city skyline wheezed while

in St. Kilda, Fitzroy St. seethed with discontinuity

and shallow breathing as Jimmy’s murderous

thoughts sharpened the shears.

Number six hundred and sixty-six Fitzroy St. was

a Malaysian Hawker’s joint. The restauranteur and

a Labrador-Deerhound cross he kept in a kennel in

the kitchen both studied Jimmy with similar

expressions when he walked into the restaurant

and proclaimed he was on a mission from Mary.

The restauranteur shrugged:

“Sorry. Not on the menu here”.


Then resumed tossing squealing noodles,

broccoli, and tofu in a wok. In his left ear Jimmy

heard the depot manager’s wife and temporary

radio operator Mary Kyrikilli. She sang a song he

remembered singing in primary school. The words

were unfamiliar: a jumble of disconnected nouns,

verbs and present tenses, but Jimmy recognised

the tune. His mother had hummed the same tune

while sitting in a chair as she tried to conceal from

her infant son the homesickness and

accompanying despair she felt for the mountains

of Northern Greece.

Jimmy’s vision of the Labrador-Deerhound’s

curling upper lip, revealing pink gristle and

canines capable of inflicting a serious incision,

was blurred by melancholic feelings rising through

his gullet and intersecting with Mary Kyrikilli’s

pursed lips whispering in his ear. The

restauranteur slipped his hand beneath the dog’s

frothing muzzle, grabbed its leather collar, and

demanded Jimmy exit the premises post haste.

Instead of ramming the shears as he had planned,

Jimmy turned and stepped onto Fitzroy St.

Next door, a fight erupted in the bar of the

Prince of Wales Hotel, and spilled out over

cascading chairs and tables onto the footpath.

Jimmy became involved in the fracas.


The bouncer, a bald headed gorilla, stomped

up and down on Jimmy’s head until a member of

the Scottish clan celebrating St. Andrew’s Day in

the bar intervened, and hit the bouncer with a Bolo

combination that cracked the bouncer’s rib and

broke his nose.

The other Jocks drinking portergaffs at the

bar broke into a chant for Glasgow singing:

“Here we go... Here we go... Here we go...”


But their striker’s score on the bouncer was

soon equalised by a door bitch well versed in Zen

Do Kai, sadism, and the cultivation of azaleas.

In retaliation, she KO’d Jimmy with a

Liverpool Kiss.

Jimmy sat cross legged amid the chaos,

losing blood from his right ear, and pleading for

help to find his glasses. He was unable to do so,

and feeling rather discontent, until one of the

Scottish celebrants finally bought him a beer.

“There you are my good man...”, said Jock to

the unremitting Jimmy. “Drink up, for you are

about to meet your maker”.


He walked down Fitzroy St. dressed in his

stove pipe suit. When he reached The Esplanade

the sound of waves breaking on St. Kilda beach

accumulated in his mind. He sat down on the dirty

sand, stared across Port Phillip Bay, and saw a

silhouette of the You Yang Range in the night sky.

He pulled his beanie over his eyes and saw an

image in his mind of a man not unlike himself.

That man wore a tungsten breast plate that

contained a moving image of the Serengeti Plain.

Jimmy now believed that he was wearing a

tungsten breastplate that contained a moving

image of the Serengeti Plain. Then, in spite of the

worm beneath his fingernail, and the cat entrails

on the windscreen, Jimmy murdered ‘The Child’.

He had wanted to go to the milk bar and buy

another ice cream, but his mother had disallowed

it, so he had placed a chair beside the window in

his bedroom, stood on the chair, and beat his little

fists upon the pane of glass until it smashed. He

had seen the ice cream stick in his mind, sailing

through the sewer beneath the suburb he had

grown up in, while hiding under the bed and

staring at his mother’s bare legs as she tried to

coax him into the open. But Jimmy had refused to

come out from under the bed under any

circumstance for he knew this meant a beating, so

his mother had sent the straw broom under the bed

in an attempt to dislodge him. He felt the scratch

and tickle, the rip and sickle like feature of sharp

straw upon his bare thigh. He squeezed further

into a hole between the bed and the wall and

slashed his elbow open on a protruding bed spring.

He cried and his mother screamed, while the real

culprit leant against the wall. The straw broom,

diffident, composed, quietly calculating the

amount of blood the boy’s wound had sprayed

upon its handle.

On the night of his breakdown Jimmy struck

fourteen people on the head with an engineer’s

hammer. When his cab sideswiped a telephone

pole in Richmond he ripped a piece of metal from

the cab’s rear door and tried to dig that worm out

of his ear. A gardener found him in the Botanic

Gardens at 8.30 am with the metal shard

protruding from the wound in his head. The worm

was nowhere to be seen, but Jimmy had mumbled

something about a bloated maggot wriggling down

Batman Ave. toward Flinders St. According to

Jimmy, his extraterrestrial partner had boarded a

train, gained six kilograms on the trip by eating

leftover packets of potato chips, then alighted in

Ringwood.

Jimmy was sentenced to three and a half years in

jail, during which he was raped by one inmate,

beaten by two, and poleaxed by a screw. Upon his

release into the community he lived with a fervour

only countered by the ecstasy derived from

watching an Old English Sheepdog urinate against

a pole. Yet Jimmy did not complain, or if he did,

then it was a complaint directed inward - to that

black hole he has remained in for the past twenty

years.

Jimmy sucks hard on a cigarette butt. A tram stops

alongside his shelter in Gertrude St. He is

preoccupied with swatting flies in and around his

beard, but the combined stare of the tram cuts him

to the quick and he is invigorated.

“Come ‘ere...”, Jimmy says.


He waves an alighting passenger in his

direction, hoping to score a fag or some coins for a

bottle of turps, but the elderly woman blows

disgust at him then disappears into a Voluntary

Helpers shop to do her bit for charity. Jimmy’s

moment of clarity dissipates in his air of lost

connections.

I watch Jimmy from across the street, sitting

in his tram shelter, one foot across a thigh. I am

aware of a certain similarity that exists between

us.


Turpentine is not my poison, but living is.


His mother is asleep in the bedroom of her

commission flat. She dreams of water sliding over

rocks that cascades into a silent pool. Alongside

one another Jimmy and his mother sit waiting for

the Achilles Laura to sail back home to Greece.

Outside, she can hear Jimmy’s voice, or another

voice belonging to one of the hundreds of stiffs on

Death Row, sitting in tram shelters on cold nights,

sleeping beneath the All Ordinaries Index printed

on daily newspapers, or simply fighting off the

demon that is Mary Kyrikilli emanating from a

microchip Jimmy believes has been implanted in

his cerebellum.

From the twenty fifth floor of the Brunswick

St. commission flats there is only the night sky.

The stars try and force the clouds apart but it is the

clouds that contain the pain scintillating in

Jimmy’s mother’s mind. She lies on her back in

the dark, listening to an alarm clock, along with

her son, sitting in a tram shelter in Gertrude St. He

shouts obscenities that are directed at nobody in

particular, yet she feels are reserved for her. She

cannot go out and embrace him or invite him in for

moussaka; the lights are on in Jimmy’s head but

nobody’s home. He screams:

“Come ‘ere gamisou.... La, la, la...”.


His mother takes ear plugs from the draw

beside her bed and inserts these into her ears.

All is quiet at 3.53 am.


This is the son she was unable to love who

has returned to torment her.


When the early birds rise the squeak they

make is an expression of ornithological glee at the

penetration of a starling’s beak into the green heart

of a cicada. Jimmy’s mother wakes, hurries to the

kitchen, and prepares a Turkish coffee.

Tony Reck