The backfire of time

The following excerpt is drawn from a new work – Chinese Postman – by illustrious literary lion of the University, Brian Castro.

Appropriately for this time-related issue of Lumen, the novel examines the experiences of older age, exploring the life of Abraham Quin, in his mid-seventies, a migrant, thrice-divorced former postman and professor, now a writer living alone in the Adelaide Hills. 

He offers up memories and anxieties, obsessions and opinions, thoughts on solitude, writing, friendship and time. 

There is nothing much you can do to ameliorate or euphemise the word “gunshot”. You could do a lot with a word like “shotgun”, used figuratively in phrases like “shotgun wedding”, “shotgun shack”, “he rode shotgun” etc. But “gunshot” only emits peril and portent. Its report is totally enveloped in time and that is what you told the police. Back to front now, it wears a jacket of time, cloaked by the night, its crack no longer immediate in recall and as I do not have a watch, I had no idea of what aspect of the night had ushered me into that menace of a gunshot; whether it was the freezing cold, the incipient flurry of light snow, the anticipation of joy. 

But apart from all this drama which has only accrued of late, Quin was normally obsessed by tidiness, by spelling, by rubbing off stains on the carpet. How quickly it arrived, middle-age, then old-age. He remembered his father’s shuffling gait; not quite balanced; the earth also shuffled; not quite balanced, and wild with contingency. 

It was as though, now that he was released into the countryside doing nightshift without a watch, it was as though he was licensed to use verb tenses interchangeably. But like his mother’s conjugations, there was no future tense. He was free to deliver mail in any order or on any specified route, as long as all was done within twenty-four hours. On daylight schedules he didn’t hurry or try to get home early. There would be long days when the sun had already gone down and he would be trudging up the hills with his bicycle, completing his duties as cooking wafted out the windows of the cottages, and sometimes a woman would wave to him but not too often because she was often too busy with cooking or children to notice him fiddling with her letter-box in the half light. He preferred not being noticed since he received a private satisfaction from depositing a missive into a private box like a sneakthief taking his pleasure from a sleeping girl by leaving her a ring or a necklace stolen from someone else. 

I only ever waved back to one of them. It was by coincidence that I had not only seen her up in the hills but had met her in the city and then there she was now, looking very pretty, a month before what I will call the Lookout Incident. I remember that day well. In the art gallery in town, I had seen myself in the glass doors like an installation, my father looking back at me, his eyes squinting against the glare just before he died into the light. I remember him saying that death was the only deadline for a journalist. As a journalist he trained himself to notice things with the instincts of a policeman, mainly about people. But he did not seem to care about what was on the periphery... a particular tree, the light in the late afternoon, peculiarities of feeling. He did not know that the key to understanding anxiety was to realise one was missing something loved and longed-for like home, because as a journalist he sub-edited emotions and was often disappointed that the homeless realities he pursued did not fit. He moved on, like I did that day, wandering into the labyrinthine alleys of cafés and cannabis. I noticed the librarian’s wife working in one of them, and when I waved, she beckoned me to enter, asking if I had a day off, to which I replied that it was a postman’s holiday. I should have said it in French if she had been French (though I found out later that she was Ukrainian), that I was un facteur en balade and with that waltzing ballad upon my lips ordered a Pernod. I read somewhere that when someone is attracted to another, their pupils dilate. I put on my dark glasses. Indeed, the light was blinding in the café, where skylights had recently been installed. 

I was saying to her, to this foreign woman, that hypothermia, like reading, is so important in shutting out the world, like hibernation, sleeping in the frozen happiness of books. She confided to me that her husband practised something opposite. As the town librarian, she said (I heard it as libertarian, but that was a matter of hearing, a choice for the foreigner, tuning in and out of differing registers), as town librarian, she was saying, he busied himself with getting rid of books. Digitising and disposal were his job descriptions. He did not read. I could see the reason for his not reading and for the holocaustic disposal of books. It was his reason for experiencing external realities rather than involving the imagination in them, and by isolating himself, he was sacrificing himself to voluntary blindness and the immolation of ideas. 

I addressed these thoughts To The Householder. Of course, she had invited them. After all, I am the postman. But they would remain unread since I wrote in a microscopic hand on the inside of envelopes which I manufactured myself, having done a course in origami – no cutting or pasting, just folding – a dove, a crane, a flower – and then the testing of unfolding without tearing, when she would toy with discovery and misreading. But this never occurred. I would find these folded micro-dove-letters thrown intact into the bin, without deconstruction or de-origami, without the butterfly-dust of love disseminated over her eyes, my miniature script remaining heavily useless and sticky with affect. 

A week after his last visit from the police, her house was for sale. The shutters were closed; there were no children in the yard; no dogs barked at his approach. The letterbox was filled with real-estate leaflets and junk mail. He imagined there was something left for him but there was nothing. He did not find out for quite a while that after losing his job, the librarian drove to the lookout that final time, passing his own house on the way, traversing a route he knew well. Perhaps he threw my paper flowers into the pond to expand them, but I do not think so. People simply do not trust books anymore and look at the misery of those writers who stir up grief like I do, delivering disorder on my linear rounds. 

Quin had heard the shot. He told himself it was a gunshot/shotgun; a backfire from which he was lucky enough to escape. 

Professor Brian Castro is considered one of Australia’s most important authors, having won multiple significant awards for his novels, verse novels, poetry and non-fiction. He is a former Chair of Creative Writing, and also a former director of the University’s J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice.

Chinese Postman was published in October 2024 by Giramondo Publishing. We have five signed copies of this novel to be won by readers – details on page 29.

Photo by Isaac Freeman, Lumen photographic editor, at the author’s Adelaide Hills home.