Disappearing off the Face of the Earth Read online

  Teaching had been a complete disaster, one of several unsuitable career choices – uptight wankers watching your every move. Fuck that.

  ‘That’s ancient history, Mum. Anyway, it should be obvious by now that I’m the kind of person who needs to run my own show.’

  ‘You can’t just run your own show.’

  ‘Why not? Dennis does.’

  ‘Did.’

  She was right, in that I couldn’t run my own show immediately. I needed to accumulate some capital, and that meant easing my way back in to the working world.

  This was at the height the self-storage boom, and Pharaoh’s Tombs were popping up like unsightly green and yellow pustules all over the land. Box Hill North was looking for an assistant: someone to help out at reception, keep the customer database up-to-date, clean out the units. Not much of a challenge, but I wasn’t looking for a challenge, just a job.

  On an impulse, I turned off the motorway and drove back towards the empty block of land. I parked my HiAce in a side street and found myself standing outside the perimeter fence. There was a plumbing-supplies warehouse on one side of the site, a plasterboard factory on the other, and bushland directly behind. I looked through a gap in the fence. For some reason, there was no sign of any construction work – just an expanse of cleared earth, waiting. The wind blew through the wire fence, scattering the sand about and making a faint hum which, if I closed my eyes, sounded a bit like a celestial choir.

  I could picture what the place would look like when they finished it. It would look exactly like every other Pharaoh’s Tomb: three yellow pyramids, each of a different size, clad in mock limestone, sitting on a desert of green paving. Every part of Pharaoh’s Tomb was either green or yellow, right down to the carpet in the reception area, which was green.

  Funny, I thought I’d left Pharaoh’s Tomb behind in Box Hill North. Now it was right up the road – or would be, when they got around to building it.

  Four

  For years, I’d sold the contents of our abandoned units myself, but it took up a lot of my time and I hardly ever made enough money to recoup the lost rent. Now I had a much better system, in the form of Kelvin Gadd.

  Kelvin’s entire life centred on one thing: eBay. Buying and selling junk made him a decent living – ‘a nice little earner’, as he called it. Kelvin had bought and sold everything you could think of, and maybe some things you couldn’t think of. He combed the charity shops and hard-rubbish piles left on front verges, picking up cheap or free stuff, spending hours photographing it and composing ads of genius, auctioning off everything from dot-matrix printers to old Yes albums (he once sold me a Yes album for two dollars, and that was officially the beginning of my love affair with prog rock). Whatever I brought him, he offloaded without fuss. We divided the money sixty–forty in my favour (my share went straight back into Hideaway Self Storage), which I thought was a fair split since Bruce and I did most of the work itemising the stuff, clearing it out of the unit, and transporting it to Kelvin’s house. I did the transporting part alone, in my own time.

  I first met Kelvin when he rented a unit off me. Most people rent units because they run out of room in their house; with Kelvin it was the other way around. He could never find a unit big enough to store his massive stockpile of eBay gear. When his mother died and left him her old Queenslander in Bardon, he moved it all in there, thus transforming the house into a glorified storage unit.

  I parked my van underneath Kelvin’s house – ironically, the only space not crammed with junk – and walked around the back, almost stepping on a brush turkey as I climbed the stairs to the deck. I knew he’d be in his office, staring at the screen of his old PC, overseeing the progress of his many auctions. I was excited because it was the first time since Kelvin and I had commenced this arrangement that I could bring him something of real value.

  I knocked on the back door. As usual nobody answered, but I was sure he’d be there. Kelvin didn’t leave the house that much.

  ‘It’s me,’ I called out.

  A fat, bearded face materialised behind the wire screen.

  ‘I thought you were coming last night,’ he said.

  ‘Didn’t you get my text?’ I said. ‘I couldn’t make it; I had some business to attend to.’

  ‘What kind of business?’

  ‘Nothing important. But I’ve got something for you and I think you’re going to be impressed.’

  He opened the door and I followed him back down the corridor, watching him navigate his sweating, overweight body through the collection of junk that filled nearly every square foot of his house. Kelvin was a coronary in the making, but he seemed to regard junk food and lack of exercise as integral to the eBay lifestyle. He had on his customary KISS T-shirt, faded King Gee shorts, and thongs. As far as I knew, he donned this uniform every morning and remained in it until bedtime. Both Kelvin and his house looked and smelled like the interior of a St Vincent de Paul’s. The dining room, living room and three bedrooms were stuffed with all kinds of crap, including bookcases full of old books, magazines, CDs, LPs, even audiotapes (something to suit all tastes: everything from James Galway to the soundtrack of Can’t Stop the Music).

  I’d recently read that hoarding now qualified as a mental illness. I wondered which had come first in Kelvin’s case: did he hoard so much stuff that he decided to became an eBay entrepreneur, or did his eBay business necessitate that he turn his home into a warehouse?

  ‘Quick game?’ he said over his shoulder.

  For some reason, Kelvin was obsessed with Yahtzhee; whenever I came over to deliver some goods, he always insisted on a game before we got down to business.

  ‘Let me just show you what I’ve brought. You’ll —’

  ‘Yahtzee first!’ Although Kelvin moved slowly, he spoke abruptly and as loudly as possible, as if unaccustomed to conversations not conducted via email.

  One of the bedrooms was almost entirely given over to old board games, stacked up on shelves and floor alike, forming precarious towers. Entering that room was like catching a time machine back to my childhood, when games involved throwing dice and moving little plastic figures to and fro. As always, my eye moved straight to the shelf with the 1950s version of Test Match. My father and I used to play that game a lot, sitting opposite one another at our round orange kitchen table, before he got sick, or before his sickness was detected. We played it so much, we wore out the levers that made the cardboard figures move. And then at some point the game disappeared altogether, as cherished objects of childhood tend to do: one day Test Match is there at the top of the hall cupboard; the next, it’s not, and you have no recollection of when it disappeared or where it disappeared to. Funny how the sight of that shiny green box on Kelvin’s shelf could take me back, momentarily, to a time when my father was still around the place.

  We squeezed our way into the room and took up our positions on either side of the old writing desk on which the Yahtzee paraphernalia was already set up: the dice, the dice cup, which had been lost and replaced with an ornamental ceramic beer stein, the bonus chips, which had been lost and replaced with coins from Singapore, and the score pad.

  My eyes and throat itched, and I began sneezing uncontrollably. This happened so frequently in Kelvin’s house that it had become part and parcel of the Yahtzee experience.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ I said. ‘Ever thought of dusting?’

  ‘Where would I start?’ He had a point.

  Kelvin dropped the dice into the ceramic beer stein and gave it a thorough shake.

  ‘Wait and see what I’ve brought you,’ I said. ‘A nice little earner, in my opinion.’

  Kelvin didn’t reply. The game had begun, which meant that from this point on he would allow no conversation that didn’t relate to Yahtzee.

  Half an hour later, the game over (Kelvin won, but I’d beat him the last two times), we walked downstairs to the garage. One of the wooden stairs creaked dangerously under Kelvin’s weight.

  ‘Might w
ant to get that fixed,’ I said. This applied to the entire house, but the stairs were in particularly bad shape; I imagined someone falling straight through and hitting the broken paving stones beneath.

  When we reached my van, I asked, ‘Are you familiar with superhero comics?’ I wanted to build the tension a bit before opening the doors.

  ‘To some extent,’ Kelvin replied. I’d fully expected him to say that; Kelvin was familiar with everything to some extent.

  ‘Check these out, then.’

  I opened the van and he poked his head in.

  ‘Doesn’t smell too good in here,’ he yelled.

  ‘Doesn’t smell too good in your house, either,’ I said.

  Kelvin surveyed the collection, nodding approvingly. It wasn’t every day I happened upon items of this calibre.

  ‘So how much do you think you can get for this lot?’

  Kelvin poked his head in again, withdrew it again.

  ‘Roughly speaking, a shitload.’

  Brilliant. I could cover the outstanding rent on Stelzer’s unit, and the rest I’d sink back into the business.

  ‘Thank you, Leonard Stelzer,’ I said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The former owner.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘The usual: disappeared off the face of the earth.’

  ‘And left all this? Why?’

  ‘You’ll have to ask Leonard Stelzer,’ I said. ‘If you can find him.’

  Five

  Nothing had changed at the Pharaoh’s Tomb construction site since my last visit. The site remained a large parcel of soft earth. Who knew why construction had been delayed for so long? Surely not because of the weather: we’d had no rain for months. Maybe there was some sort of dispute going on with the builders. I didn’t know – more to the point, I didn’t give a shit. Actually, I did: the longer it took, the better, as far as I was concerned.

  I wandered around the perimeter of the site, listening to the fence as it sang in the wind. I thought back to my stint at Pharaoh’s Tomb Box Hill North.

  The manager’s name was Ron Wood. He was younger than me, I could tell, but he looked older, as if the middle-aged man who should have been waiting to greet him some fifteen years into the future had arrived early, complete with two chins and a polo shirt.

  When he introduced himself on my first day, I said, ‘How are Mick and Keith?’

  Ron looked at me blankly. His eyes were large, black and shiny, seemingly pupil-less, like those of a seal.

  ‘Mick and Keith,’ I said again.

  He said, ‘Who are Mick and Keith?’

  ‘The Rolling Stones?’

  ‘Right. What about them?’

  ‘Mick and Keith. And Ron Wood. You know – from The Stones.’

  ‘Before my time, buddy.’ He never called me by name; it was always just ‘buddy’.

  We began the induction tour. First, he showed me the three storage pyramids standing in a row. The first pyramid had a big sign on each face saying MENKAURE.

  ‘What’s that mean?’ I asked, just to test whether, if he didn’t know the members of The Rolling Stones, he could be expected to know anything about ancient Egypt. I’d read up on the pyramids at Giza before applying for the job; I like to immerse myself in a subject, memorise as many details as I can. I was sure I knew more about the pharaohs than Ron or probably anyone else in the entire franchise.

  ‘It’s just the name of the pyramid, buddy,’ Ron said. ‘Menkaure is the small one, Khafre is the one in the middle, and Cheops is the biggest.’

  ‘But what’s the significance of those names?’

  ‘That’s just how we identify them when we’re allocating storage units,’ Ron said. ‘Depending on what the tenant wants to store and what size unit they need, and what units are available at the time, we send them to one of the three buildings.’

  ‘Yes, I understand that,’ I said. ‘What I mean is, aren’t those the names of the pharaohs? Each name corresponds to the king the pyramid was built for – around two and half thousand years before Christ.’

  Ron looked at me. He really did remind me of a seal.

  ‘Well, yeah, course,’ he said. I could see he was bluffing. ‘But that’s not something you need to know, buddy.’

  We continued the tour, entering Menkaure and travelling up the central elevator. Ron showed me the inside of an empty unit. We remained in there while he explained how things were done at Pharaoh’s Tomb, a set of clearly articulated procedures that I would be expected to follow.

  ‘When you think about it,’ he said, as we made our way back to the front office – the only building not shaped like a pyramid – ‘the pyramids were just an early form of self-storage. Literally, in fact: the pharaohs were buried along with their most prized possessions.’ I suspected he’d just remembered that fact and had brought it up as if to say, You’re not the only one who knows about pyramids. No doubt he’d picked up that titbit from the franchisee handbook, and he was probably kicking himself for not remembering it half an hour earlier.

  ‘The only difference here,’ he added, ‘is that there are no dead bodies.’ I could tell he’d made that joke a dozen times before, so I laughed as if I’d heard it a dozen times before.

  ‘That would explain your slogan,’ I said. The company logo was a yellow triangle against a green background, with Pharaoh’s Tomb: For All Your Treasures written underneath.

  ‘Precisely. Between you and me, though, most of it isn’t treasure at all; it’s mostly worthless shit. And you’d be surprised how often the people it belongs to just abandon it and leave it for us to sort out. But because it’s nearly always worthless shit, we end up chucking it away. This very unit we’re standing in – we emptied it out just yesterday. They had bags of fertiliser in here.’

  ‘Yeah, I wondered what that smell was.’

  ‘You’ll smell worse – wait and see.’

  ‘So basically I can look forward to emptying out people’s abandoned units.’

  ‘Pretty much. We have this alternative slogan here: Pharaoh’s Tomb: An Expensive Way of Getting Rid of Stuff. But hey – it’s not my money.’

  ‘Makes you wonder why they bother storing it in the first place.’

  Ron Wood gave me a patronising look, as if he’d finally one-upped me.

  ‘Buddy, some mysteries will always remain mysteries. I mean, look at the pyramids.’

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘These pyramids?’

  ‘No, I mean the actual pyramids.’

  ‘What’s mysterious about them?’

  ‘Well,’ Ron said, ‘how did they get there?’

  ‘Weren’t they built by thousands of slaves?’

  ‘Yeah, but even so … how did they do it?’

  There’s nothing worse than having to work under someone who’s both younger and stupider than you are. Bruce had yet to appear, so at that point it was just me and Ron Wood and a couple of casuals. I worked there for nine months and probably could have lasted longer, despite Ron, if not for the unpleasant episode I mentioned earlier.

  But it was a job, at least, a means of earning necessary capital, the first step on the road to property investment and financial independence. But that wasn’t something to be rushed into; Dennis, with whom I’d re-established contact, had told me that. Unfortunately, I’d chosen to re-establish contact at a point where Dennis had already forgotten a lot of things about property investment – useful things. But he remembered me, and that was a good sign.

  Six

  I was in my office, reviewing the CCTV footage from recent weeks, monitoring the after-hours life of the facility. King Crimson’s In the Wake of Poseidon was on the CD player. I hummed along to ‘Pictures of a City’. A lot of people will tell you that Poseidon treads the same ground as Crimson’s debut album, In the Court of the Crimson King. I disagree, although I would say that Court is an absolute classic, whereas Poseidon is merely a classic.

  Two weeks had passed since I’d seen Bruce straighten
ing the trolleys – a one-off incident, it seemed. I switched between the cameras in the central loading bay and the ones positioned outside the lift. My surveillance system was out-of-date, limited to key public areas, but there was no money to upgrade it. Pharaoh’s Tomb, on the other hand, would be bristling with the latest PTZ cameras – once those green pyramids were erected and the place opened for business.

  Every now and then, the monitor showed some activity. A car or van or utility appeared in the central loading bay. Someone got out of the vehicle (at that time of night it was nearly always a solitary person) and proceeded – sometimes having loaded up a trolley, sometimes not – to the lift, emerged on Level 1 and made their way down one of the corridors, looking ghostly in the fluorescent-lit gloom, like dodgy amateur footage on a TV show about UFOs. One of the big attractions of self-storage is that it gives you the freedom to come and go as you please. If you want to retrieve a dining table or a jet ski at three o’clock in the morning, or just spend a few hours sorting through photos of your life-changing trip to Nepal, then there’s nothing whatsoever to stop you.

  I switched back to the central loading bay, expecting it to be deserted for the next couple of hours. But no: there was a white van, and there – to the right of the screen – was Bruce, in the middle of his crouching-down-at-the-rear-of-the-row-of-trolleys routine. He made a few adjustments, resumed his position at the end of the row, crouched down, checked the trolleys again, then stood up again to admire his work. The grainy monochrome image rendered Bruce even more nondescript than he looked in real life. The time on the screen said 1.30 a.m.

  Once he’d finished with the trolleys, he walked off in the direction of the lift, disappearing from view. I didn’t get a chance to switch to the camera outside the lift, because – as if he’d somehow leapt off the screen and reassembled himself in the office – Bruce was suddenly standing right next to me.