Excerpt from the novel The Soft Castle — Nicholas John Turner

Richard Foley and Ron Tsolkas are waiting on the ambulance.  

Tsolkas has indigestion. Also, something is itching him beneath the thicket of wiry chest hair contained by his long-sleeved cotton drill shirt and its polyester sanitary liner, wherein the conditions year-round are unwaveringly slimy and a veritable greenhouse for things that itch. For the best part of the last half of an hour Tsolkas has been cupping his hand at his lower sternum and innocently nudging his shirt’s third button with his pinkie finger so to gently graze the affected area in a way that very nearly means that he’s not really intentionally scratching it. The soft throbbing of his hand’s cup gives the impression that Tsolkas is discretely nursing a very small bird that has fallen out of the tree that for just as long he’s been circling and staring up into in a fixated and fascinated and bemused and generally inquisitive way, erstwhile moving clockwise under the canopy, crossing one foot over the other. He remains always close enough to the trunk to allow him to lift his leg and feel it with his boot’s sole’s fore on occasion, dragging the deeply lugged rubber down the trunk’s surface and receiving as he does a bodily sense of its bark’s texture. Pausing roughly once per lap, he very deliberately scans a theoretical line from the roots under his feet to the branches over his head, back flexing and arching dramatically, the flat upper plane of his long, balding skull flipping a full one-eighty degrees in the process. You’d have to be awfully close to hear what he’s muttering. 

Richard Foley glances over. In a good chunk of Foley’s forgettable dreams Ron Tsolkas, aka The Stickman, is off in the near distance with his flank to Foley if not his back. Tsolkas is preoccupied by something unclear while Foley plays out the immediate or else apparent conflict of the dream. He can see or sense Tsolkas’ lips moving but not hear what’s being said, and yet these soundless words are all-consuming. Both wholly peripheral and essential. Like the atmosphere in which the dream is playing out. Or the overwhelming theme, to which Foley is therefore left ignorant. The effect of this is that Foley often does not feel directly addressed in his own dreams, as though he is somehow not their actual subject, and that he does not understand—and is in fact not even invited to really consider—their true meaning. This he finds, naturally, humiliating. Though it’s also true that neither in his dreams nor in the real-life instances that inform them does Richard Foley ever go over and simply ask Ron Tsolkas what it is that he is thinking about or saying. Foley’s careful and deliberate construction of Tsolkas’ impression of him doesn’t permit him to concern himself with the old man’s general dithering. 

Ron Tsolkas is short, all but technically bald, narrow shouldered, slightly bow legged and leather skinned. His hard, round belly catches the eye, and everything above it looks gaunt and pulled at and generally burdened by the belly’s weight and girth. The overall impression is of a distended latex sack beheld by his skull’s top. Of late the vertical lines on his face are stealing even the wizened wrinkles from his eyes’ corners by which once you could sense or be caused to wonder how intensely he was thinking, into which depth of his experience he was at that moment steeping himself. He shuffles like a very pregnant woman, nursing his stomach’s distention with the upturned palm of his left hand, turning his body with his steps, sometimes even with his other hand propped in the small of his back. Though for all that, he is not especially or even notably obese; it is the composition rather than size of him that offends. 

A toddler’s fistful of stubborn strands of absolutely ink black hair set off from his short forehead, variously long and thus collectively thinning such that those that actually reach the nape might well be individually named. Richard Foley has seen deeply archived photos of a young Ron Tsolkas—even then kind of pear shaped despite evident youth and vigour—in which the gleaming, upwardly brushed, jet-black crop atop his partner’s head looks both kind of solid and liquid, not to mention fantastically odd, like a giant, trembling, tarry slug at rest on an egg. It is also, very clearly, where the personal pride of the young officer at that time resided, the feature to which the rest of him directs its observer’s eye. If The Stickman’s hair was indeed his soul, as his colleagues had jested of him in those days, then what could be said of his sad follicular state of the present day that was not kind of spiritually depressing? All that was unchanged above his eyebrows was its sense of being still essentially moist. His scalp appeared to secrete something that made it glisten and to reflect a small, warped but otherwise faithful image of the ceiling lighting of any room he stood in just as surely and in fact with more fidelity than the oily mane that had once sat atop it. But what was perplexing about his head’s top’s particular microclimate was that, despite Ron Tsolkas’ generally chronic and seasonless tendency to perspire from every part of himself, the scalp itself proved always to be an utterly unified plane, with not but a raised bead of sweat to trouble its reflective smoothness. And, indeed, as strangely dry to touch as a perfectly clean mirror is. 

The other gag among officers from the days of Ron Tsolkas’ hair’s resemblance of a slimy, sun-doped lizard was to prolong the s sound from the first of the s’ in Ron Tsolkas’ name. Richard Foley was first made aware of this after an encounter with a former partner of his current partner in whose friendly greeting the hissing sound was so awkwardly prolonged that it seemed to Richard Foley that the man had a lisp so profound it would have qualified as a handicap. 

Tsolkas now looks up and scratches his neck slowly and the whole of him from breast to lip seems to collapse, jawlessly so, like he’s scratching his skull from the inside. It’s actually kind of disturbing to Richard Foley how much Tsolkas has begun to look like a snake with something ambitiously substantial sitting undigested in its belly, especially so as he stands there staring up at things and mumbling with the seemingly inaccessible interest of another species. Indeed, the intent with which Ron Tsolkas is generally summing up the tree does make a more than plausible allusion to a thing that is seriously considering coiling up in its branches to process something in safety and peace. Or else, perhaps more practically, to simply disappear into the seclusion of its canopy. Though despite the fact that the phonetic play upon Tsolkas’ name and his general film of viscous moisture and ill-defined jaw and his strangely instinctual summation of the tree’s canopy seem to collude in a way that suggests near ineffably a thing of serpentine and/or reptilian nature, to indulge this coincidence of images so far as to permit them to begin to describe their subject’s moral or professional character would be a presumption poorly served by the allure of poetry; Ron Tsolkas is, among peers and colleagues, of untarnished reputation and trustworthiness. Of dry and frictionless morals. In short, a good and trustworthy officer. Even Richard Foley knows that.

Richard Foley arches his back and bathes his face in the blue sky’s intense brightness, squinting like he’s just now stepping outside. It is truly hot. The sun is but briefly pleasant on his skin until its real intensity banks and circles back and stings like a fire-provoked wasp, and only now does he realise that the flap of his legionnaire’s cap is turned up like some dramatic gutter around the back of his head and that he has therefore been wearing direct mid-afternoon UV rays at the exposed rear of himself for who knows exactly how long. He takes his hands from his coarse-feeling pockets and swats the cap’s flap down, and the way his neck’s skin responds to the sudden shade is to instantly ooze sweat that feels like chilled grease. Days of assured discomfort splay out in premonitory dread before him like ominous faces of toppled tarot cards. He envisions himself in forty-eight hours’ time blindly pulling skin in rubbery shards and bringing the coiled, translucent yield aimlessly before his eyes. Until now, Foley has been leaning against the flank of a blue hatchback, elbows splayed on the roof, forearms two lengths of an equilateral triangle, chin upon the knuckles of his paired and tight-fisted knuckles, his belt’s buckle flush against the window and shoes more or less square between one side’s wheels. But now his elbows open their aperture, his hands slide one upon the other, and his slackened mouth slides onto the small lump of muscle between his right hand’s thumb and index finger. He starts to gently suck, eyes open but wholly glazed over in the manner of a breastfeeding baby. Evidently, this is exactly what the patiently trilling magpie in the nearby tree’s lower branches has been waiting for, because a matter of seconds later it explodes all black and white terror and rattling clicks at Foley’s temple and sends the young officer in a petrified, hand-flailing crabwalk around the hatchback and across the grass to his partner’s side. Ron Tsolkas, who doesn’t seem to have been watching, without his eyes’ gaze leaving the tree’s foliage, makes a familiar quip about Foley having seed in his ears. It’s a matter of fact that Richard Foley is swooped by territorial birds, in season or out, with unusual frequency. Tsolkas further points out, also without seeming to look, that Foley is bleeding. Foley, who’s not really listening, makes a small, sarcastic bow while he crawls awkwardly out of his shallow grave of shock and mortification. This is sort of their routine when Foley has suffered skyborne attack.

Beyond the northbound lanes of traffic, two ropy and shirtless young boys are standing on a metal-edged cube at the centre of a small landscape of concrete obstacles. Between the whisking sounds of traffic Richard Foley can hear their laughter and the rhetorical gist of what they are yelling at him across the street. The figures are swaying spectre-like in the exaggerated heat that mills like smoke in their hard, grey surroundings, and Foley can tell surely enough that they’re imitating as well as cursing him, spindly arms raised like long antennae, faces ecstatically twisted as they clap their skateboards on the ground to make a racket. There is no sympathy in their impressions of him evading the magpie. Their cursing, though unclear, is both unrelenting and, needless to say, unsympathetic. Foley, still with one hand raised in now redundant self-defence, and frankly on the cusp of something in terms of patience, takes a deep nasal breath and pretends to be looking beyond the figures at something in the distance, a matter practically of ignoring them, and, strategically, of attempting to dispel their interest in him. Though the swallowing of pride with regards to taunting, and in general, comes to Richard Foley as naturally as the waiting of tables to a wild brumby, and the invocation of even the most rudimentary officer’s technique for off-setting public disparagement has never seemed to him as emotionally liberating as the trainers and their monitors and graphical proofs always attempted to sell it to be. In all likelihood it is this magnanimous personal effort of emotional repression that sets up the conditions for Foley to snap sardonically at Ron Tsolkas as he begrudgingly turns his back on the kids in the skatepark, something along the lines of, ‘are you going to fuck that tree or what Stickman,’ and then immediately kind of huff and shrug and flash his partner his two flat, empty palms as in forget about it or sorry or whatever. My bad, etc.

Though instinctually disposed to a sense of institutional family and to the honour of pedagogy, seventy-three-year-old Ron Tsolkas long ago learned not to enforce or overplay his experience with the ever more disparately youthful partners he was being put into the field with over the last two decades or so. With everything he knew it had been difficult, initially, to withhold his presumed authority. Though he sympathised with the changing times and worked earnestly within the evolving system. In his own cadetship the tiers of rank had been both more strictly defined and more emotionally overwhelming in a manner that he recognised now was both dated and even dangerous. And it required some personal rewiring to adopt a more contemporary style of mentorship, and gradually it came to him more or less naturally. It may even have dawned an entirely new sort of purpose in his work that had eluded his younger self, and which prolonged his career well beyond what he had previously predicted as his own retirement age. In time he became encouraging, patient, and supportive, enlivened by the privilege of affecting the destinies of mostly young men, each of them in some small way the son he never had.  By the time he was partnered with the complexly ambitious Richard Foley some eighteen months ago, a man some forty years his junior, Ron Tsolkas was considered among the department’s most empathic and effective senior partners; sensitive, tolerant, highly enabling and invoking of quiet but ineffable respect. 

Any yet, two decades of pastoral excellence proved no match for just a few weeks in the footsteps of Richard Foley. Ron Tsolkas soon became the bumbling, ageing cardboard cut-out of a sidekick to which he’d so long denied his submission, focused mainly on expediting or indeed ignoring the shame of having fingers snapped in his direction when rudimentary or demeaning tasks presented themselves, which state of necessary Zen by now he had more or less mastered. And indeed to see him dithering around a scene, awaiting Richard Foley’s commands, is to likely forget that Ron Tsolkas is and has always been an exemplary double-o in the old-school post-police mould, widely celebrated for an uncanny knack for what officer’s privately call ‘efficient procedure’ and which among themselves they consider the job’s primary skill and in the deployment of which age never depleted his legendary shrewdness, his frankly awesome knack for the seminal act of stepping onto a scene and getting right to the nub of what is really going to matter to its reporting, and, just as impressively, to the minimisation of bother and ongoing interest to citizens caught up on whatever it is that requires observance. Which, in fact, are the only absolute talents one can possess in double-o work because report-writing—the other four-fifths of a double-o’s professional life—is so exquisitely complex and obtuse that it seems as though the ever-changing templates and criteria charts and digressive pop-quizzes and little mental puzzles and memory exercises are there specifically to deny officers the ability to become skilled or even confident in fulfilling them. Each seems to be its own randomised departure point for mental digression and/or introspection, the observation itself rarely, and indeed vaguely, addressed. Even the most experienced officer is kind of hypnotically innocent in a report’s fulfilment, which can take as little as a few minutes or, occasionally, multiple days. 

In their very first assignments in their field together, Ron Tsolkas had stood at a respectful distance and watched Richard Foley as he had all the others. The young officer, unsurprisingly, stumbled over key information and took long looks into blue nowhere and scratched his chin like the world was there to wait on his wondering. Ron Tsolkas merely smiled at the naiveté and self-consciousness of it. And he waited patiently for the younger man to invite his council, as every officer who’d ever stood for the first time in the field—suddenly alone amid the complexity of the situation, and newly imbued with an appreciation for their real-deal inexperience—had surely done. And yet no such council was summoned. Foley turned one way and then the other, painted with a dopey smile that became occasionally hardened beneath a furrowed brow and then a dopey smile again. He drew his issued microphone from his pocket and began to speak into it at an inaudibly low volume that either way wasn’t being registered because Tsolkas could see that the recorder’s active light was unlit. And when he ventured to mention even this small and incontrovertible fact he was met not with gratefulness or even substantial recognition but with a raised hand and the muffling of the anyway non-recording microphone against the young officer’s chest as Richard Foley declared that the old man should under no circumstances ever in the future disturb the continuity of his train of thought. That in fact he should know better than to do so. That what was already lost to the report by the infraction was on Ron Tsolkas now to explain should an explanation be required.    

From the beginning Tsolkas had been frankly unprepared for Richard Foley’s lethal combination of farcical incompetence and inexplicable self-righteousness. And shortly after they were partnered together he was reluctant even to approach him. But for a brief while, to preserve both his pledge of hands-off mentorship and his presumed record of thorough observation, the act of partnering in a ground-level observation became for Ron Tsolkas a kind of crude comedy of manufactured ignorance and near slapstick efforts to surreptitiously draw Richard Foley’s attention to one glaringly obvious matter or object of importance or another, and to do so in a fashion that preserved the far from reasonable but fundamentally plausible interpretation by Richard Foley that the finding was in fact his own doing, the latter being no less enchanted by his delusion than a bumbling toddler reaping hidden Easter eggs under near-total adult assistance. And indeed Richard Foley had far, far less trouble believing in his evidently supernatural observational gifts than in actually observing anything. Furthermore he tended to declare that all relevant evidence had been exhaustively noted immediately following his doe-eyed and slackly open-mouthed reception of but the very first of Ron Tsolkas’ stealthily spoon-fed objects of interest. And so, as well as being a pure burden to their essential task, and of having the insatiable and volatile self-image of a dictator or child, Richard Foley was compulsively attempting to abandon scenes that were in fact only superficially observed and often a long way yet from truly neutral, the defiance of which compulsion came at yet further cost to his partner's already impoverished reserves of patience and humiliatingly creative obsequiousness. The subtlety involved in the management of which particular iteration of Richard Foley’s negligence turned out to be a whole other artform for Ron Tsoklkas to master. In time he would learn that Richard Foley respected only categorical authority and was an amazingly unselfconscious kiss-ass to upper management despite his utter disregard for Tsolkas’ generations of real-world officer experience. And at Ron Tsolkas’ age the task of whittling down the young man’s egomania and getting to the heart of his insecurity turned out to be of an order of selfless investment to which the veteran was no longer inclined to be subjected. Within a matter of months the once eminently respectable Ron Tsolkas had begun talking to trees or feigning an interest in birds or architecture or whatever he could plausibly contemplate to distract himself from the downright obliteration of his previously impeccable record. He generally waits now for Richard Foley to tug his sleeve or bark his name and deploy him for what the young officer finds too demeaning or menial, as one waits to be called into an invasive bodily exam.  

Fortunately, Ron Tsolkas has four daughters and is, by comparison to Richard Foley, to the swallowing of pride as a duck to water. 

Foley mumbles, mostly to himself, ‘sorry Stickman, bird’s in my system’, and then ‘still flapping.’ He folds his head back across his shoulder-blades to illustrate it, like he’s trying to kill an ant with the rolls of skin on his neck. This of course aggravates the burned skin and Foley stops. 

The compact blue hatchback the two officers are watching over has one of those colourful, translucent circular stickers on the upper right-hand corner of the rear window that with some interpretation one can see is a whale breaching into a green sky. Under it there’s an old and flaking bumper sticker that is faded mostly to whiteness but which again with close inspection reveals the letters ‘hletics’ on its far-right quarter. The fine orange demister lines are also all peeling and shedding like under-irrigated creeper vines. The sun is shining upon the hatchback’s back as directly as a desk lamp and the contents of the rear cabin are lit like museum exhibits behind the untinted window. There’s buckets and brooms and a vacuum cleaner and all sorts of rags and cylindrical metal and plastic cans and even more and more oddly shaped buckets. The way it all bunches up against the window gives the false impression that the hatchback is on a radical incline, or else that everything in there is gasping for air and scrambling to get out. Which makes for a stark contrast with the man in the front seat, who with two large, purplish hands crossed serenely on his lap and head folded limply back over the rest is sleeping deeply and with apparent otherworldly fortitude, for all the rousing that he resisted before it was decided to wait on the ambulance and not to move or attempt anymore to interview him. 

Since Foley has returned to the hatchback Tsolkas is the only one technically standing on a roughly triangular grass island the longer flanks of which bend slightly and convexly to the West so that from above it gives the impression of an elf’s hat that kinks a little on the way to its sharp point. Along the short base of the triangle is a series of eight diagonal car parks across two of which the hatchback is parked non-diagonally and thus like a loose tooth. The other parks are vacant. The one defining feature of the island is the large, squat tree at roughly its geometric middle, which though not especially tall has both dense and far-reaching foliage that shades most of the island and some of the car parks, but not the ones that the hatchback is crossing. Tsolkas, who is known as Stickman or The Stickman or sometimes just Stick because of a schism between his own ethnically sensitive pronunciation of his name and the less sensitive way others tended to, ignores the tree briefly to observe his young partner observing the hatchback which, since there is a living human being inside, it is of mild frustration but no surprise to Tsolkas that Foley has not thought to move all the way into the shade. Or at very least to roll down its windows. The ambient temperature at this moment is 38 degrees Celsius. It is cloudless. From what Ron Tsolkas can tell, the act of studying a particular thing for Richard Foley is greatly informed by staring at it at a distance from which as far as Tsolkas is concerned everything that can be learned already implicitly is. A sort of exact mid-range from which the object is monadically singular, an idea in the observer’s mind, and therefore probably the only vantage from which it’s possible to be looking squarely at something and basically not seeing it. Known among veteran double o’s as the ‘daydream vantage’, it is symptomatic of the precise loop of introspection that officers are specifically trained to avoid during an observation. Richard Foley lapses into it with a consistency that seems to Ron Tsolkas almost as indulgent as it is belligerent.  

Richard Foley is at thirty-four years of age just a few months older than Tsolkas’ first granddaughter. When Tsolkas looks at Foley these days it is, admittedly, with weary and meaningless resignation that might be interpreted as fascination, as though looking into a phenomenon without centre or narrative, like staring at waves rolling in or a sun rising or setting. Coincidentally, then, when Tsolkas stares at Foley staring at things Tsolkas is, like Foley, regarding something as though it were not capable of doing or revealing anything of interest. Lulled, by its predictable rhythm. At this moment there’s a trickle of blood rolling down Foley’s cheek and the way he wipes it away with the back of his hand without even looking or paying it any evident mind almost makes it seem like he’s not inclined to draw attention to it. Which is strange in the sense that Richard Foley is both a pathological hypochondriac and a die-hard fisherman for acknowledgement of his as it were non-acknowledgment of discomfort. Which he believes is basically what ‘toughness’ is. Indeed, when he wakes up from whatever it is he’s thinking about and notices the small smear of blood on his hand Foley is predictably disappointed to find that Tsolkas is no longer looking at him and that there probably wasn’t an audience to witness him accidentally not dispensing any particular self-regard or panic for the fact of his bleeding. Plus, now there’s no suitably casual way to draw attention to himself and to incidentally draw attention to his disinterest in the blood without it seeming that he personally wants Tsolkas’ attention, short of summonsing some sort of ulterior reason relating to the observation to justify his command of it, which reason presently eludes him since he’s not really thinking about the observation at all. The frustration is complex and small, but not quickly forgotten. 

On one of the long, slightly curved sides of the triangular island, that across which a grassed park is blurrily visible, the traffic runs north. On the other, south. The tip of the triangle is thereupon the point at which two stretches of double-lane one-way traffic emerge independent from, or else meet to form, a bi-lateral road, depending on which way one is going. The base of the triangle where the car parks are is its own brief one-way lane that heads roughly west and allows for southbound traffic to effectively u-turn onto the northbound lanes. It also allows, naturally, access to the few car parks and seemingly then also to the grassed triangle itself, which really seems too big and kind of pleasant to be a mere traffic island, though given the immediate and dense chain of vehicles running hard up its flanks it’s a struggle to imagine it being used as a legitimate recreational park either. There are no benches, for example. What most makes it seem tranquil at that moment is the way that Ron Tsolkas is once again gazing up at the tree in a state of stubborn contemplation, which almost negates the fact that the decibel level of four lanes of arterial traffic within no more than a twenty-metre radius is loud enough that Richard Foley, from just a few steps away, has to kind of bark to be heard saying that he is ready to declare it a neutral scene and that Tsolkas should note the time. 

After a little scratching of the grass underfoot Foley returns to the hatchback. The magpie proves to be very particular about its territory or else capricious in its tolerance because it seems to give Foley an enormous amount of rope as he steps out into the clearing again. He (the magpie) makes a woody kind of gurgle that would no doubt send Foley back where he’d come from if he took even a moment to consider its probable meaning in light of his vulnerable position and what happened the last time he was standing out there. What he (the magpie) watches is Foley’s large, short-clipped mousey brown ball of a head move along the hatchback’s side and pause to stick its long nose against the passenger window. This is presumably OK according to it. Roughly half an hour ago, when the hatchback was pushed back out of the intersection by Foley, Tsolkas, and two female citizens in stretchy, ill-fitting gym wear, Foley for some reason had thought it suitable to press his hands to each of the car’s left side’s windows as it described a short arc toward the park’s edge, as if the car was liable to tip over or something. Which of course it wasn’t. If anything Foley was contributing a few ounces of force against the efforts of the others. And one little need imagine what Ron Tsolkas thought of the thirty-something-year-old junior officer kind of leaning unconstructively against the side of the hatchback tossing little breadcrumbs of motivation while the seventy-something-year-old and well decorated officer pressed his ear hard up against a front left-hand floodlight and rugby-scrummed the car out of immediate danger with only two small women for what didn’t even really quality as help, unable even to wipe the greasy sweat from his eyes to see how far was left to push. Suffice to say that Tsolkas was combustible enough by the task’s end to feel himself unarmed with the inner composure to suggest that the car might be better put in the shade not three or four metres further on than converted into a kind of slow cooker in the completely sun-exposed spot where Foley had them all inexplicably terminate the journey.  

Foley is looking now at the handprint he’s left on the window and admiring how distinct the scar is where the skin had been opened up to unravel and pin down a tendon that had snapped somewhere in his palm and rolled up to the tip of his index finger during the last few minutes of what would anyway have been his last game of schoolboy rugby. Which injury, Foley recalls with something like nostalgic affection, was the legendary result of friendly fire. In which characterisation he is, in fact, accurate in his own unique way. He can still remember the way the hand, lit by a pin of light that had made its way to the bottom of a pile of bodies in which Foley was trapped and awkwardly folded, was singularly visible in the tangled darkness, like some candle-lit chamber in a castle’s lightless catacombs. He saw again with cinematic suspense how the face of one of his own team’s members emerged from the shadows, and how the face was eyeing the glowing hand and licking its lips like a dog at a butcher’s window, and how the face gave Foley a direct and unflinching glance that for the rest of his life Foley would grossly misinterpret as fraternal in nature, this team’s member being also one of the core members of the social group to which Foley had attached himself at his high school, albeit in Foley’s case more peripherally and at exhausting psychological expense. Foley watched in bafflement as onto the comparatively small hand crawled two thick, reddened hands that looked really like different species, giant spiders onto a dying mouse. In any case, once the sinister deed was done and Foley had been condemned to wearing a sort of bionic glove through all the formalities of his graduating year, it was perhaps the true mark of his eye-rollingly delusional social self-awareness that he’d used this cowardly and extreme and to everyone but him quite obviously unaccidental violence upon him to actually attempt some sort of heightened kinship with his attacker, suggesting that he, Richard Foley, the hand’s owner, had been similarly disoriented by the tangle of bodies in which they were caught and equally enraged by the rivalry with their opponents and that he’d been a matter of moments from perpetrating the very same violence against what he was just as surprised to learn was ultimately his own person. Which anecdote, whenever Foley told it, waving the bionic glove around like some infallible punchline and nursing his only ever partially eaten lunch on his knees for how hard it was to manage with one hand, was so delusional that his teenage peers, who probably ranked among the most emotionally insensitive people in the world, actually winced for the awkwardness of it. And for Foley’s pitifulness in general. To top it off, for the whole rest of that schooling year Richard Foley put in a mighty effort to make his metal-pinned hand the subject of just about every conversation in which he was even incidentally involved, believing as he did that an immediate social circle would consider a dramatic injury to one of its members a mark of both heightened bondage and even honour. Which of course it ideally would be, though just as ideally one’s social circle would be a circle of people that actually like you.   

The magpie’s gurgling begins to waver and fade and fluctuate, like some small engine that’s long been left idling and is beginning to gasp on thinning fumes. Tsolkas has been watching it out of his eye’s corner for a while.  He cuts a strange figure as he does so, hands in pockets, eyes generally in the foliage, one steel-capped tan booted leg splayed at about four o’clock as he again feels the tree’s lower trunk’s texture with its sole, like some injured ballerina testing a strained hamstring. He watches the bird the way the ballerina might have picked some point on the ceiling for balance as she envisages free and full movement some time ahead. Tsolkas has a hopeful premonition too. 

On the passenger side of the hatchback a mangy-looking blanket with a pixelated design of yellows and blues sits folded and set deep into the seat to fill up what must be busted springs, the layers of material compacted hard by the double-convex mould of buttocks. The carpeted area for the passenger’s feet is worn raw in two lines like something’s been scratching there, exposing the hard, grey, speckled metal of the car’s shell. Two broomsticks or mop handles poke into the front cabin over the handbrake and hover blunt-skewer-like near the tall man’s ribs. There are no signs of distress. No blood. The tall man’s knees splay around the steering wheel. His right leg reaches well up into the windowpane and the other juts across the cabin and would almost certainly be visible through the windscreen from behind the windscreen of an oncoming vehicle. Foley is beginning to wonder how common it is to see another driver’s knees as he passes in traffic and he thinks it’s probably rare indeed. More curious still is the way the tall man’s head, folded back over the headrest, is turned aside and pressed so hard up against the roof that the peeling vinyl upholstery sags across his face like a warm towelette being lowered onto it. To Foley’s bemused estimation, for the tall man to be so positioned would require an effort of contortion if not morphosis, and he recalls that when he and Tsolkas had arrived on the scene the tall man’s head was most definitely leaning forward in the front cabin and sort of hanging from his shoulders like a lamp, and one of the reasons he’d initially rolled up the window was that he figured the man’s head was going to lop out of it. At some time while Foley has not been watching the tall man has shifted into a position so obtuse that Foley is now unsure if there is a safe way to remove him without cutting away some part of the seat or roof. When the tall man slowly breathes his whole self waxes and seems to even more accurately describe the dimensions and shape of the cabin to which it is awkwardly formed like some spineless sea-thing to its obscure shell. 

Foley mumbles, sort of but not really at Tsolkas, that the man’s unusual size, though already noted, has perhaps as yet been underestimated. Because what he has started to grasp is that the tall man, whose actual height cannot be readily judged, is making the fairly standard-sized hatchback in which he’s seated look more like a child’s plastic replica plaything that he’s been cruelly folded up and fed inside of. And that his tallness must thereupon be non-comparative but instead sort of categorical. Though just as soon as he says it Foley quickly realises that concerning himself with the tall man’s dimensions might be what double-os refer to as worrying about a herring’s shade of redness, and believe it or not Foley sees himself as practically religious from a by-the-book perspective, an illusion that Ron Tsolkas goes to great pride-swallowing lengths to not disturb because he no longer feels even fractionally that it’s his business to burst Foley’s bubble.  Foley will not mention the tall man’s tallness again. And thus, incredibly enough, it is never really mentioned. 

Now and then upon their arrival when Foley was trying to wake him the tall man would open his eyes and mouth things dry and soundless. Foley now moves around to the hatchback’s other side to see if it is still so. He wipes the grime off the rear side window with his bare elbow. Given the scene’s declared neutrality, this isn’t exactly protocol either. The magpie shifts from one branch to another, presumably for vantage, effecting a rustling that the transfixed Foley only unconsciously perceives insofar as his right arm’s skin tightens, affected by mild goosebumps. The tall man’s horizontally oriented face consumes all of the oval window within the window that Foley has made with his sleeved elbow and it moves with the vague dispirited animation of a zoo exhibit. His eyes are wide and slender, dopey and tortoise-like, trepid against the notion of opening as of a child to the leaving of its mother’s arms. Foley thinks the long, shell-like eyelids are like the undersides of primitive canoes for primitive people to travel rivers upright and naked and spindly as spears in. There’s an introspective sense in Foley’s mind that what the eyelids are really protecting is his grasp of their eyes’ designs, so close does he perpetually seem to determining their colour before they recede again like cryptic suggestions. If they are not green then they are brown, he thinks. Though official reports will record the tall man’s eyes as being deep water blue. 

In truth, Richard Foley believes that he is in many ways too intelligent to be a field Observance Officer, though he’s aware that generally his colleagues are not intelligent enough to understand why and probably never will. Ron Tsolkas, who Foley also considers intellectually inferior, is in Richard Foley’s mind the conduit between himself and the Inner South double-Os’ broad fraternity and hierarchy, being an elder officer of a seemingly institutional bent, with a record peppered liberally by mentions of various committees and teams to which he’s historically contributed or belonged. Given Richard Foley’s calculated decision to remain distant from the extra-curricular double-o world, making a quite particular impression on Tsolkas, as a means of maintaining a certain standing in that world, is a perpetual background concern.  Most of Richard Foley’s tactics in this regard are frankly strange, their subtlety revealing of his complete misunderstanding of Ron Tsolkas’ overwhelmingly low opinion of him. Whenever talking directly to Ron Tsolkas, by example, Foley directs his attention at a small ripple of scarring on the left-side of Tsolkas’ nose’s bridge. Accordingly, in bemusement, Tsolkas used to self-consciously scratch at that spot on his nose while they spoke. Though Foley is now quite certain that Tsolkas has come to understand the look’s true meaning; that the young officer is in fact as it were gazing beyond or through him, preoccupied by something far past the old man’s reckoning or understanding or ability to even slightly compete with on a scale of significance. In his mind, Richard Foley is thereby achieving a certain enigmatic impression that he expects Ron Tsolkas diffuses in their shared world, the elusive sense that there is something impressively aloof about the young officer, some look in his eyes, as it were, a kind of restlessness or noble distraction. He does not expect a man of Ron Tsolkas’ limited capacity to understand what exactly he is witness to in the presence of Richard Foley, only that he ponder its meaning among those who would surely make more sense of it. In short, Foley believes that Tsolkas is unwittingly delivering to all the right places the material evidence of his genius, the way bees unwittingly pollinate distant flowers and squirrels propagate forests with the nuts in their faeces. He is also, incidentally, revealing his complete misunderstanding of how double-o’s are assessed or regarded or elevated to higher positions and by what means their effectiveness is understood. And, in truth, the only thing that Richard Foley has actually achieved by staring not-quite-straight-on in this manner is that Ron Tsolkas has periodically reported that his partner is slightly cross-eyed, hopeful of getting him withdrawn from the field on medical grounds, at least for a blessed while.  

The soundless gestures of the tall man’s mouth, observed closely behind glass, seem to Richard Foley at that moment both sort of eerie and sad, sentiments that are needless to say way beyond the approved emotional periphery of active observation. The feeling he has as he stares is that of observing a rare and endangered animal in captive solitude, a thing parenthesised from its natural habitat and in a kind of inevitable decadence of spirit because of said habitat’s inextricable role in said spirit. His sympathetic reverie would presumably have been even more pronounced were he able to perceive simultaneously the way that the tall man’s large right hand is opening and closing ever so slowly on his lap in the front cabin, a kind of tragic beckoning, as though the last flake of this trapped thing’s withered soul and indeed (by extension of Foley’s analogy) of the collective soul of its kind is right there in its palm, so insignificant now that a tiny wren might pluck it out and transport it into practical oblivion. Which mercy seems to be the thing’s want, the irrational pitch that its hand is making to the cruel world by so attempting to coax it closer, as though fingering the ocean’s surface to summon a distant ship. A cooler and far more professional assessment, combined with a lick of actual experience, would more likely put all of this down to involuntary or else unconscious physical tremors either with or against the as-it-were grain of whatever narcotic the tall man has taken, but Richard Foley for reasons beyond fathoming is for the moment struck by the tall man’s seeming of another species cruelled by the obnoxious curiosity of another. Of the tall man’s face at that very moment, of its muted cry to him, by whatever vast association, he is plunged into the memory of a young, retarded boy who’d once by accident taken his hand.  

When Richard Foley and Ron Tsolkas had arrived at the scene three citizens were in attendance of sorts. Four, counting the one confined to a pram and presumably ignorant of the curious hatchback. Two of the citizens were overweight young women awkwardly encased in spandex pants and singlets who between them were pushing the child in the pram, though at the time it was unclear to which, if either, the infant actually belonged. The other citizen was a forty-one-year-old male who had parked his large utility truck at the service station across the street and was directing traffic around the hatchback with all the pirouetting fluidity and theatrical gesturing of a veteran road marshal, replete with eye-rolling impatience at the drivers that either did not readily grasp his exaggerated gestures’ meaning or else uncooperatively slowed down to try to decode the mystery of the little blue car that had terminated its journey right in the middle of the intersection and which though seriously weathered and decadent looking was in no obvious way damaged.  The moment that Ron Tsolkas saw the man out there doing a pretty impressive job of keeping the traffic moving and appearing to be in some sort of quiet euphoria of civil pride, he needn’t even look sideways at his partner to know that trouble lay ahead. Simultaneously witnessing the same as they came over the rise of the southbound lanes, Richard Foley began so eagerly checking and rechecking for his badge in his right hip pocket that Tsolkas speculated he’d probably by now polished it back to a blank, brass lozenge.     

What have we got here.

Richard Foley’s lip was cocked as he said it. It was not intoned as a question. Tsolkas well enough knew that the younger officer was picturing himself on horseback descending into some rogue township whose mutinous sheriff he had a mind to ceremoniously overthrow. Foley’s hands were actually quivering on the steering wheel. Not speaking up at this very moment just to offer a small note of recommendation in the hope of subduing Foley’s bullish and explicitly unprofessional excitement required from a decorated officer of a half of a century’s experience a tongue of rodeo-grade, double-stitched leather. And Ron Tsolkas, after eighteen long months in the shadow of Richard Foley’s unholy trinity of biblical self-righteousness, professional ineptitude and breathtaking delusion, had necessarily developed one of those. 

They had turned into the small west-heading lane and parked the landcruiser half on the kerb on the opposite side of the street from where the car parks were, Foley positively convulsing at the way the man in the intersection, who couldn’t possibly have known they were double-o’s inside the unmarked vehicle, tried to wave them into continuing south and made a small but unmistakable shake of the head when Foley turned right instead. Foley actually made a kind of furious swatting gesture from behind the windscreen that Tsolkas felt the wind of and then the young officer really and truly punched the glass and let out a tiny squealing noise like something deeply fissuring, and when he rode the land rover up onto the kerb he was still looking furiously over his shoulder and almost took out a fledgling Jacaranda and a brightly painted electrical fuse box. Tsolkas was pretty sure the car was still moving, its driver’s door wide open, when Foley was already marching into the intersection with his badge raised at eye height like some wooden cross staving off a vampire, which incidentally was so far against protocol and plain-old stupefying that Ron Tsolkas, who was a couple of feet behind, actually dropped down on one knee at this point and pretended to retie his shoelace for want not to have officially witnessed it. Tsolkas then turned back to retrieve his traffic wand and returned to see the man shuffling with bowed head to the edge of the street and Richard Foley close behind, microphone’s barrel aimed squarely at and perhaps even prodding his neck, execution style.   

Richard Foley spread his legs really wide and began by stating his name and code. He then drew a strange, unique shape in the air with the microphone to synch it with whatever footage was going out. When he pressed the red button at the base of the microphone the noise around them suddenly softened, like an invisible door had just shut around them.  Foley interrogated the man with the two women and the pram as a sort of audience-cum-chorus, as he saw it. The women stood shoulder-to-shoulder. Though quite short, both were taller than Foley with his legs spread so wide. If he appeared distracted then it was mainly because it was really hard to balance that way. 

According to Richard Foley, and for the benefit of everyone present, without valid and citable credentials as a traffic marshal, the man for all his so-called good intentions had just picked up a long and tangled skein of capital L liability that who knew what the possible long-term implications of were exactly. Turning to the women, hands open, he then described liability as the key to all matters of civil disruption, and as being, for the sake of their lay minds, like a bowl of spaghetti where basically it looked like no strands had any ends no matter how much you ate and as being basically the most ill-advised thing on earth for one to make the exquisitely poor decision to attempt to pick up even a single bit of. They were, by this explanation, as confused as one would expect. He then turned back to the man and said that liability was also in fact five dimensional, the fifth being basically the part of it that made it immaterial and also perfect. It was this fifth dimension, according to Richard Foley, that the man ought at this moment to be frightened of.  

The man had come from some kind of work for which he wore overalls and which had left him filthy and brownish. He was tired just to look at. His boots were forest green and their toes were layered like armadillo shells. He was a little taller than Foley—even if Foley hadn’t been standing in a manner so oddly splayed that it bordered on gymnastic—with one crooked eye or a very lopsided squint, and there was some kind of half-eaten bar of food next to a pencil and a miniature torch in his breast pocket. Small, circular, frameless glasses had until then gone unnoticed holding up the fringe of his soft, spiky hair in a kind of shell-like fan over his face. His expression was not-quite impressed, cautiously disinterested. Foley, who by his own estimation was frankly entitled to the moral high ground, and to an apology of sorts, was determined to remove the ambiguity from the man’s regarding of him. In every way he could fathom, his righteousness was legislatively grounded. He was also just doing his job. 

The man started to speak:

Look, I was just coming out of the shop…. 

Foley raised his hand and clicked his tongue, inexplicably really; 

That’s all very good. And if first you would just outline your credentials in the guidance of traffic? Please just state them first, if you don’t mind. For the record. And for my own peace of mind.

The man shook his head in confusion and displeasure and Foley mimicked him unkindly and glanced quickly over at the women to ensure they’d seen his little whine. They were basically behind him, and thus hadn’t.  

Look, I was just coming out of the shop. I saw the car stuck there in the middle of the road. Traffic was building up. I figured you guys would get here eventually. I was trying to help till then.

Richard Foley rolled his eyes;

Credentials. If you may. 

The man shook his head. Again, he was mimicked.

You have one last opportunity here. Silence presumes you have no such credentials. 

The man merely stared. Richard Foley was thus satisfied by the man’s culpability. It probably goes without saying that this sort of quote unquote civil negligence to the natural unfolding of liability tended to be seen by society in general and reasonable officers for the exercising of common-sense that they truly were. Double-o’s referred to them as a kind of grey crime, the outcome of which was likely to be no punishment per-se but—unfortunately at times—all manner of inconvenience and procedural expense to the negligent party, and for the most officers were kind of phlegmatically apologetic for their part in condemning the accused party to their unfortunate bureaucratic fate, like parking officers giving out tickets on a badly signed street, and in fact they were typically less than phlegmatic and frankly consoling and helpful to anyone whose commitment of a so-called grey crime was an act of evident goodwill. Double-o’s were generally speaking of a preference to not be seen as society’s punchline and/or pain in the ass. Richard Foley was naïve to this preference, and thus non-general in this and many other unscripted facets of double-o being.  

Richard Foley stood now in silence, his microphone extended to within a hair of the man’s tightly pursed lips, eyes wide and generally trembling with impatient expectation. Richard Foley did indeed show occasional cold fidelity, or at least familiarity, with the aspects of his training in whose fulfillment there was little or no interpretation. He was thereby at this moment of silent interrogation exemplifying the general rule of double-o training that encouraged officers to say as little as possible in recorded interviews in the interests of liability’s strongest establishment. The unidentified third party that reviewed all potentially admissible evidence and who every double-o referred to as The Stooge evidently preferred by statistical proof the smallest number of double-o words per subject word in liability-related recorded exchange. The shaded graph that illustrated The Stooge’s acceptance patterns in this regard looked in fact something like a nautical flag. That being said, however by-the-book this taciturn interrogation method was, Foley’s way of staring down his subject and darting his eyes back and forth between microphone and subject in a manner that can only be described as threatening was certainly against the book’s spirit, as it were. Incidentally, though neither Richard Foley nor Ron Tsolkas was aware of it, the microphones they each held had preoccupations and recording capabilities well beyond those in which the officers’ role was a conscious one. This ‘innocent’ data was, generally speaking, much more interesting to the so-called Stooge than that which the officers were trained to procure. It just so happened that the aforementioned graph, given an incredible amount of data and drawn on a small enough scale, looked indeed like the sketch of some unbelievably basic formula.     

The man shrugged and raised his eyes, staring at the microphone’s end like a gnat.

Richard Foley lowered the microphone and the noise of the traffic again rose up. He turned for the first time to see for himself what the blue hatchback contained. There was, he realised, someone at the wheel. Someone large and unmoving. He (Foley) said;

This man’s trouble may be your trouble, if it is deemed so. 

The man shot a look past Foley at the hatchback’s driver-side window and kind of craned forward to try to see the face that was at that time and from that vantage like a mask hanging from the interior’s roof. Foley momentarily turned himself and thus did not witness the man unleash the wrapped food from his pocket, but when the parties were face-to-face again the man had the whole of what turned out to be a muesli bar in his mouth and the wrapper was crinkling in his fist and he was chewing and breathing loudly through a broken nose with one whistling nostril and his eyes were a little dopey from the task of it.

This is simple, said Foley as he watched the man chewing and tried as subtly as possible to crab his feet a little closer together without it being obvious that he was doing so. Just so that he could be within range of the man, height wise. Partly because from down where he was stuck the warm, noisy jets of nutty, cinnamon-dusted air shooting out of the man’s nostrils was hitting him right in the eyes. He hadn’t seen it happen but the man was definitely a step closer now too. 

What’s done is done, the officer continued, not rising as quickly as he’d have liked. It’s out of my hands now. But I’m afraid to inform you that you have unpleasant times ahead as a consequence of your actions. 

The man was cleaning his teeth with his tongue now and when occasionally his lips parted the large, pink muscle flashed across the opening like a reptile’s wet belly. 

Just to confirm the rumour’s details, Ron Tsolkas had read the file about Foley’s undescended testicle that was, right after puberty, unfastened, removed and replaced with a free-hanging prosthetic. As legend or just plain old history would have it, during a bonding event early in his cadetship Foley had shown a handful of veteran officers how, by pulling his scrotum tightly around the synthetic ball like suffocating someone with a plastic bag, the little crescent moon eclipsing a full moon that was Organico’s mark showed up under the bloodless skin like a coin’s face under fine latex. Tsolkas roughly traced this incident to the time at which Richard Foley swore off all forms of alcohol or stimulant usage, even coffee. No energy drinks. No iced tea. He now checked the packaging of everything he put in his mouth, wary even of herbs that were said to possibly stimulate. This, Ron Tsolkas could confirm.

Just then Tsolkas was trying to rouse Foley’s attention because, loathe as he did the informing of Foley of anything at all, it was beyond obvious that the car blocking the intersection had to be moved. The intersection was far more complex than even the experienced officer had assumed and he was struggling to find a moment to turn back and shout without relinquishing his delicate jurisdiction over the latent chaos. A shopping plaza to the west immediately behind the service station was serviced from the north-bound traffic by a single lane ramp that bridged over the southbound lanes and landed on their far side. However, this lane permitted both a right and left turn at the intersection—to the carparks aside the one lane at the base of the grass island, and the plaza, respectively—the former of which required its own amber light to denote the giving of way to the two oncoming lanes of southbound traffic, a portion of which of course was turning left, though because of the hatchback’s location this lane was unable to safely assess the oncoming traffic, and having managed to riskily do so then needed to describe a significant arc around the obstacle that passed right through the left-turning southbound lane. The obstacle, meaning the hatchback. The result of all this and more was a serious matrix for a four-limbed being to mediate alone, and Tsolkas, who was old, and who was indeed also employing his booted feet to point and direct, was literally dizzy with the management of it. And plus it was alarmingly hot and his practically bald head felt like it was being urged to hatch. He yelled out to Foley again, arms a-tangle and one leg Flamingo-cocked, but all the young officer could hear was the sound of the man’s one noisy nostril and the shucking of his finger as it worked the valleys of his gums so close to the young officer’s face that what emerged from the mouth was striking him like pellets of muck from under the wheels of a sliding off-road car. Which is not to say that Tsolkas’ yelling wasn’t audible.   

Foley had managed to bring his legs closer together and to get more or less upright. He remembered the women that were watching from somewhere behind him and, relieved to have somewhere else to reasonably be, turned and took two steps toward them. He opened his hands like a preacher. One of the women was at that moment picking some kind of seam or resolving a crease in the lycra between her buttocks. Seeing Foley turn toward her and look right into her eyes and begin what looked like a speech of some significance, in his mind at least, did not inspire her to cease or in any way hurry along the process. For the length of his address he did not see her right hand emerge from back there. Plus her top lip was cocked with the intensity of her blind effort. 

Liability is distributed like leaves, too murky and scattered to point at. Or so it most often seems. Sometimes the strands of liability are so complex and distended, so confusing despite their implicit logic, that they can be called beautiful. And yet it takes just one outside hand, one interjection, for that strange beauty…

The women’s attention, or what sense he had of it, had drifted to somewhere behind him. When Foley turned around again the man was half-way across the street back to his car, just a few metres from where Tsolkas’ entirely unsuited physicality was performing calisthenics just to try to unblock the ramp. When the man reached the other side he turned and gave Richard Foley a complex hand signal, index and middle fingers extended from an otherwise closed fist’s back and gaping slightly as though to ingest an imaginary horizontal line. Across the stark background of his green-shirted torso he made a few jerky surges with the slightly splayed digits that clarified it wasn’t a gun he was miming, just in case there was any doubt. Somehow in the few moments that had passed Tsolkas had employed the two women with the pram in the removing of the car from the intersection—traffic briefly be damned—and Foley might have merely watched them get all the way to the other side if they weren’t headed straight for him. 

Having looked fixedly through the driver’s side window for so long, Foley suddenly realises that the tall man’s jaw is what’s moving, the lips merely parting as they become caught up in the act. Like he’s chewing on very small bits of nothing. The man has apparently shaved in the last couple of days but there are two very obvious little tufts of hair on his cheek and under his nose that might have been a couple of days older again. Out of the very corner of his eye Foley notices that the tall man is wearing knee-length socks that only make it halfway up his shin, and that they appear to be held up by gaiters so tight they look like seams. And that’s what leads the officer to look down into the darkness wherein he can just make out the car’s pedals like objects at the bottom of a dirty fish tank. To their either side he sees what looks like child’s sized football boots inside of which he can only imagine the tall man’s feet actually fitting if they’d previously been minced and strained and reshaped as dry, shriveled models of their original selves. And yet there they are at the ends of his long legs, like some absurd amalgam of two radically different bodies. Foley draws his head back just a little to think, with something approaching rationality, about the oddity of what he’s witness to, cocking his neck to snatch just a kiss of the overhead sun on his face, and smiling just because it’s indeed briefly nice. It is just then that whatever leniency has been hitherto extended to Foley is, in the mind of the magpie, finally exhausted. 

***

Nicholas John Turner is from Brisbane, Australia. His previous novel Hang Him When He Is Not There was published by Splice (UK) and Zerogram Press (USA). The Soft Castle is his new novel.