Smythe's Theory of Everything Read online

  Smythe’s Theory of Everything

  Robert Hollingworth is a successful and talented visual artist as well as a respected writer. As an award-winning artist he has held thirty solo shows since 1980 and has works in more than twelve public collections.

  Until recently Hollingworth was better known as a writer for his essays and short stories which have received critical acclaim. His more recent longer works include Nature Boy, self-published in 2004, and They Called Me the Wildman: The Prison Diary of Henricke Nelsen published in 2008 by Murdoch Books. This book was shortlisted for the South Australian Premier’s Literary Awards Fiction prize in 2010 as well as being selected for the NSW Premier’s Reading Challenge List in 2009, 2010 and 2011.

  Smythe’s Theory of Everything

  Robert Hollingworth

  For Ken

  Published by Hybrid Publishers

  Melbourne Victoria Australia

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © by Robert Hollingworth

  This publication is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests and enquiries concerning reproduction should be addressed to the Publisher,

  Hybrid Publishers

  PO Box 52, Ormond 3204.

  www.hybridpublishers.com.au

  First published 2011

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Hollingworth, Robert, 1947-

  Smythe’s theory of everything / Robert Hollingworth.

  9781921665523 (pbk.)

  A823.4

  Cover design: Robert Hollingworth

  Digital edition published by

  Port Campbell Press

  www.portcampbellpress.com.au

  ISBN: 9781742980881 (Epub)

  Conversion by Winking Billy

  In memory of J. J. Hyland

  In 2001 the author found a little diary written by J. J. Hyland. He was sixty-two and in a nursing home. The following is inspired by his story.

  For my brother Ken

  The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality.

  - Tim Folger, Discover - Science,

  Technology and the Future, June 2007

  The reality of life in a pension-level home is one that most have never heard about, never seen and don’t know exists. I am confident that if they did know, they would put up their hand to help in whatever way they could.

  - Colleen Pearce, Victoria’s Public

  Advocate. The Age, 29. 09. 2009 Failing

  Our Vulnerable

  The bottom line, Craig, is that time is no more than a measuring device based on the revolutions of planets. And it works very bloody well. But it goes awry on one important occasion: when it comes to sizing up the true nature of the universe. Come to think of it, it goes awry on another occasion as well: when it comes to sizing up the true nature of people; that is, judging them by their age.

  - Jack Smythe

  John R Smythe

  Height: 5ft 5 1/2” or 166 cm or 1.66 metres

  Weight: 9 stone 6 lbs or 132 lbs or 60 kg

  Hair: Dk brown

  Eyes: Dk brown

  Next of kin: Christopher Smythe (son) or Lisa Villas (daughter)

  If lost, answers to the name of ‘Jack’.

  Medications

  Coloxyl with Danthron (faecal softener with peristaltic stimulant)

  Argyrol for bowels (white emulsion compound)

  Alusob for upset stomach (build up of bile due to gall bladder removal)

  Aludrox - Antacid tablets

  Mylanta - Aluminium Hydroxide gel,

  Magnesium Hydroxide (for neutralising bile in stomach)

  Lasix (pronounced phon. Lay-six) to treat fluid in feet (1 per day)

  Mogadon (1 tablet on retiring - for sleeping)

  Savlon cream, Amolin cream, Aristocort (for feet)

  Murine, Visine, Argerol (all drops for the eyes)

  Good normal pulse rate is 70 to 80 per minute

  Temperature in Fahrenheit = 1.8 times Celcius + 32 i.e.

  (1.8 x Cº) + 32 = Fº or (Cº x 2) - Cº over 10 + 32 = Fº

  Phar Lap’s heart was 6 kilos (= 13.2 lb)

  1

  An ant has six legs and as such, has the potential to move them in 4,683 different ways - or permutations, to use the correct term. Those 4,683 different permutations include moving three legs on one side and then three on the other, which would be a rock from side to side, and moving all six together, which would be a jump or a hop. The ant, however, uses only one of its 4,683 options. It moves two legs on one side (front and back) at the same time as the middle leg on the other side and then reverses the process in the next step. Though I wonder why it has six legs at all. Four should be plenty, like mammals.

  The spider has eight legs. It is remarkable to think that those extra two legs mean it has an astounding 545,835 different options for the order in which it could move them. Yet like ants, all 38,000 known species of spider the world over move their legs in just one sequence. Figure that out! And figure out what that sequence might be. If there was a God (and don’t get me started) it would take that omnipotent bearded wonder a lifetime just to resolve that single issue.

  When I was sixteen, Kitty and I had a spider living behind a poster on our bedroom wall. That was the year my life began. If I were to choose the exact moment, I’d say it would be 9 a.m. on the morning of my birthday. You might think I had sixteen years before that, 5,849 days to be exact, including leap years. But I can tell you nothing happened in all those 5,849 days, nothing at all. But that morning of my birthday it all changed. It was a Saturday and Kitty and I were just lying on our beds stretched out and staring at the wall. I can see that room as though it was here right now: the globe hanging down, the stain near the ceiling in the shape of a brontosaurus, the punch hole in the plasterboard where my father did his block and the row of three nails in the back of the door.

  And my big poster of the Solar System. Even in those days I wanted to know about planets and stars and what it all means. From my pillow, those spheres of wonder-ment fairly flew around the sun and I knew in my imagination every aspect of them; their moons, comparative densities, surface structures, gravitations, atmospheres, compositions - the entire meaning of existence was contained in that one buckling poster.

  And behind it there came to live a big huntsman. One morning I woke to see it right there on the wall. I took an old dart from the bedside drawer, aimed carefully and threw it. Missed by inches. Kitty screamed - not at the spider but at me.

  ‘Leave it alone, you prick,’ she said.

  I should have known she’d take a fancy to it. That’s my little sister, afraid of nothing and ready to defend anything or anyone if she deems them to be taking it up the … well you get the point. Me, I couldn’t give a rat’s backside and that morning I just wanted to do that spider an injury. I just wanted to kill the fucking thing, make it suffer for being a big crawly, stalking around in our bedroom with eight fucking legs all moving in the same order the world over. And living behind my poster, happily, because Kitty would have killed me if I’d harmed just one of its estimated two million body hairs. Haley the huntsman she called it. And in time, it actually became our one and only friend.

  Forty-five years ago that was. What happened to those four and a half decades, approximately 2,342 weeks, 16,440 days? And how did I come to end up in this fuck ing nursing home? ‘Eden’ they call it - can you believe it? Fucking Eden! As though it’s the original Paradise - abundance, beauty and innocence. This place is as innocent as
the glass tube they shove up your backside. Fourteen days I’ve been here. Fourteen days in which to push my wheelchair through the smell of the dying, a heady mix of body wastes and Nilodor. They think the latter rectifies the former but it only provides another layer of unpleasant complexity. ‘Who is “they”?’ you may ask. Uncharitable, marble-hearted pseudo-nurses who will bite your head off if you dare smoke in your room. I don’t exaggerate. And the food! It must be seen to be believed. If a fridge magnet fell in the pot it could only improve the taste. Why am I here in this house of the dying? You may well ask.

  It would be an understatement to say I’m feeling down. First chance I get I’m leaving. Pack my bags and just march right out the front door. I already know the exit code (the postcode plus ‘e’). A fool could observe the staff using those numbers yet not a geriatric in residence takes any notice. Press those digits into the pad, shove open the big wooden doors and just march right out into the sunlight. First I have to work on my legs. They’ve got worse. But in here at least I’ve got time to work on them, get them pumping up and down like they used to. And then I’m going to dump the wheelchair and walk right out of this poor excuse of a bedroom, straight up the passage and I’m gone.

  Week three begins today. Fortunately I’ve found my little Oxford dictionary wrapped in a plastic bag; a very pleasing discovery and it gives me plenty to do. I never cease to be amazed by the English language and how little we know of it. You only have to read a half a dozen pages of that little navy blue book to realise we only using about 25 per cent of all possible words. For instance, who knows what a coprologist is? A writer of obscene books; a painter of indecent pictures. Gk kopros: dung, logos: discourse. Coprology is therefore, shitty language. Oxford p. 179.

  As long as I am forced to endure a month or so in this Godforsaken camp, I think I might write the remarkable story of Kitty. ‘Always write about what you know’ is the advice of the bards. Therefore I’ll put down what I remember as well as I can. Kitty deserves it; the most beautiful person I have ever known. Without her I would be nothing at all, not even worthy to be sitting here in a hole like this. Eden. Can you believe it? The room here no bigger than the one we had at home.

  Some time in the early fifties, my mother, Kitty and I moved into a one-bedroom flat. And Kitty and I slept in that one bedroom while our mother took over the lounge. She lived in that lounge, the double bed jammed between the wall and the couch, and any old time of the day you’d find her stretched out, legs spread so she could see the big TV looming up at the foot of the bed. When I say big TV, I mean big box - the screen itself was small and oval and black-and-white. It was an Admiral, one of the best brands and by far the most expensive item in the flat. Mum bought it with what was left of our father’s cash just so she could watch the Melbourne Olympics - it was the first time the games had ever been televised. After that she was hooked.

  When 1957 came all the new programs started: I Love Lucy and Father Knows Best, the latter a concept which seemed ludicrous to us. Mum protected that TV with her life and we were not allowed to switch it on or off or adjust the channels. We watched it when she was out, which was most nights, and we had to sit on her bed to do it. But we’d always make sure we returned it to the channel she left it on and be out of there by the time she got home. We’d hear her come in, click on the set, collapse on the bed and be snoring in minutes.

  During the day that big Admiral went all hours and the room would fill with smoke, the big glass ashtray so full of butts they fell onto the carpet. Then it was time for Mum to go to the pub. It would be fair to say that she was resigned to a life of nothingness - she worked at the pub, drank at the pub, watched TV, smoked and slept. Needless to say, it didn’t worry us at all.

  In our room we had a wireless which picked up most of the shows we wanted: Biggles, The Goons, No Holiday for Halliday. We had a bed each against opposite walls and some nights we’d reach out in the dark and touch fingers. Other nights Kit would come over and get in with me and we’d curl up together like a relationship. Though nothing funny happened. Only when I was about fourteen did we do a bit of exploring; we were fascinated with our changing bodies and maturity coming on and it was as much an education as anything else. There was no sex education then. I’m talking the 1950s. As far as sex went all we knew was what we learned from each other. She knew about erections and what goes with it and I watched her body grow into a lovely young woman with all that it entails. My only venture into crime involved knocking off packets of Tampax at the chemist.

  On hot weekends while my mother was out we used to lie around our room naked. But it was all innocent. There was such a thing in those days - innocence - a concept that just isn’t available to the young now. Back then it was perfectly natural that we should share our private lives and intimacy; we were close in age and grew up side by side like Siamese twins. We were virtually inseparable.

  Our father cleared out about five years earlier. Going to work in Real Estate up north, he said. But we were at school the day he went and after that we never heard from him again. I cannot say I ever knew him; even less as I would find out in years to come. At that time I never thought of him as a bad man. Sure he could get awful angry but he never hit us, never raised a hand to our mother even when she came home so bad she couldn’t get out of her clothes.

  I hardly remember much about him at all. Except that he once told me he’d always hoped he’d have an excep-tional son rather than an ordinary one. And I remember his constant refrain from the age of about five, You got no intestinal fortitude, Jack. No intestinal fortitude. At that time I imagined I’d been born with some part of my anatomy missing and I had high hopes it would eventually grow back.

  Apart from that my father hardly paid me any attention at all and I just went into my teens assuming he was skilled at particular things but parenting just wasn’t one of them. I created a simple logic for it and I remember explaining it to my little sister: you can be good at one thing - say ‘gardening’ - but unable to play tennis to save yourself. Our father could produce great tomatoes but when it came to being a Dad he couldn’t even manage the ball toss. But that’s all I ever thought about it and it would be another thirty-odd years before I would discover the awful truth and see the man for what he really was.

  That day of my sixteenth was just like any other and being a Saturday we just stayed in our room, Kitty staring at the ceiling, me staring at my planets poster. I did not foresee how that simple poster would one day play an important part in my future.

  Suddenly Kitty said, ‘Happy birthday’.

  ‘Yeah, thanks,’ I said and then we just lay there listening to the bell on the railway crossing. We used to count the dings on that boom gate bell. I’d say, I got seventy-four and Kit would say, I got seventy-eight. Then one night that bell just wouldn’t stop. It just went on and on and on. After that we never bothered counting the dings again. It was 1957, the year TV really kicked in.

  Suddenly Kitty said, ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Where?’ I said, thinking she meant to Porter’s or even down to the creek which wasn’t a creek but a big concrete culvert under the main road.

  ‘Somewhere else,’ she said. ‘Somewhere away from this doghouse; we could go and live somewhere else.’

  ‘We haven’t got any money or anything.’

  ‘So what?’ she said. ‘We could find an empty building. You know, abandoned.’

  A strange feeling flooded my body - I remember it as if it was yesterday. It was as if I’d had that same idea all along but it was only when Kit said it that I knew I had it. On my own I would never have acted on it, but when Kit said let’s do something it was as infectious as the plague.

  ‘We could just hole up somewhere in the city,’ I said.

  Kit sat up.

  ‘There’s heaps of empty factories. Maybe an old house.’

  A minute later we were out the door. We took the tram to Errol Street and then spent the whole day just walking around looking for some
thing empty. But we came up with nothing, only a few derelict sites with broken glass, damp brick and piss-wet corners where even an old wino wouldn’t stay. It was getting late so we headed back to the tram stop - and that’s when we spotted the brick building on the corner of McKillop and James. It was set back a few metres with a tall cyclone fence right around; an old two-storey factory with a few windows broken on the ground floor and the letters DACO on the side - the leftovers of a bigger name. A sign on the fence said Property of Chemcel Pty Ltd and Keep Out. The lock on the gate looked old and untouched. We went down the narrow alley between the fence and another building and that’s where we got in under the wire. Kit found a steel picket and we used it to lever up the mesh just enough to crawl under. But there seemed to be no way into that building. Then Kit found this kind of cellar trapdoor with old bricks and rubble over it. Ten minutes later we were down in that dark hole and then up again inside the building.

  ‘Gotta go down to go up,’ Kit whispered for no reason. I remember that because I thought it was true: we had to go through that big down-time at home so we could go up into our own future.

  Straight away we quit school. Then over the next week we shifted our stuff into the Daco, a bit at a time on the tram while our mother was down at the pub. She never caught on once. We sold a lot of things to the second-hand dealers: ornaments, a tea set - even our grandmother’s old wind-up clock - and still our mother didn’t notice. We didn’t think of it as stealing. It wasn’t as if we sold anything useful - except perhaps our wireless. And then we just started our new life.