AUT Master of Creative Writing Thesis Exegesis - Scholarly ...

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AUT Master of Creative Writing 2008 Shorty © Michael Botur 2009 Model Railway When Dad took us to Model Railway Club, which had a sophisticated letterhead and not much else going for it, I’d get frustrated with the kids who drove their trains slowly and who built straight tracks. They say the point of a journey is not to arrive, but try telling the passengers that. Something’s gotta happen on the train, for real. I used to make big booming noises that drowned out everything, then bring in the Fat Controller. He was great coz he was fat and proud of it and didn’t have anything to hide. This guy at the Club fully swore that if you took one of your sister’s Barbie dolls and turned it upside down, you could see down her cleavage. I tried it right in front of him but when I declared that I couldn’t see nothing, he said I had a problem with my eyes. I tried it with Zebra Lady and Purple Girl – they were from a different set of toys, this bucket full of broken ones that were unlikely to get fixed. They were too broken to belong to the Barbies but they had more going on than the railway characters. Zebra had white hair. Purple Girl had hair so blonde it glowed in the dark. They were my sister’s toys and I felt okay about keeping the toys alive after my sister got smooshed. Zebra Lady, she had the toy equivalent of cleavage; Purple’s chest was flat. I turned the Zebra Lady upside down and couldn’t see any boobs. It made me feel stupid, firstly, and then ripped-off. I whined at Dad until he got my eyes tested. The optometrist explained that yes, I was bound to be disappointed if I was trying to see things that weren’t there. But I carried on watching cartoons and going behind the TV to see the rear of the characters. To really spice things up, I would put the broken figurines in the back of the carriages. I would pretend they were Jews on the way to Auschwitz. Certainly no room in the schedule to stop for food, although I’m sure Zebra and Purple would’ve thanked me for not encouraging their indulgence. I liked how they could only fold into a right angle, it was good for their posture. I would sit there on the carpet all bored with no one to 46
AUT Master of Creative Writing 2008 Shorty © Michael Botur 2009 play with, folding the dolls, straight-bent, straight bent. I would sit them side by side, even if they weren’t from the same set. I didn’t want to make them too uncomfortable, although I think eventually they rubbed off on each other. The Fat Controller doubled as a Nazi, just because he had authority. I made him interrogate the lady dolls because those were their roles. The Fat Controller needed something to antagonise him; Zebra Lady needed someone to remind her that she was broken. When I straightened the dolls out to make them stand to attention, there was no room for them in the carriage. * * * I’m pretty sure she was a model, she was unreal this girl. We got to Kingsland and the train purred up beside the platform like a horny kitty. I think the train stopped exclusively for her, but of course loads of other wankers got on. This young girl, she had blonde hair and soft cheeks like a gosling. Her old lady looked more like a goose, white with old silver hair. You could call the older one middle-aged if she was gonna live to be a hundred and twenty. The younger one was mint, she had a waist I’d say size four; the older four-and-a-half sorta thing. The older one looked like the younger, but a dried-up scarecrow version of her, frazzled perm and these kinda silver sidelock curl things that dangled like her big earrings. The youngster was pulling off grape coloured berets matched with wine-coloured short skirts; her old lady wore this nasty nylon jacket, black with white stripes or white with black stripes, I’m not sure. Rigid body too, that’s what good posture will do for ya. I think the younger’s name was Polly, we’ll go with that, I read it on the label of her blouse when I was standing behind her, Polly Esther if I recall it right. Polly had one of those relationships where she calls her old lady by her first name. ‘Flaurel?’ ‘Speak.’ ‘Could I have the seat today?’ 47
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